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You Think It’s All About Guns?

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Published : May 21st, 2018
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Category : Editorials

Is it possible that we Americans only pretend not to notice the conditions that produce an epidemic of school shootings, or is the public just too dumbed-down to connect the dots?

Look at the schools themselves. We called them “facilities” because they hardly qualify as buildings: sprawling, one-story, tilt-up, flat-roofed boxes isolated among the parking lagoons out on the six-lane highway strip, disconnected from anything civic, isolated archipelagoes where inchoate teenage emotion festers and rules while the few adults on the scene are regarded as impotent clowns representing a bewildering clown culture wrapped in a Potemkin economy that has nothing to offer young people except a lifetime of debt and “bullshit jobs” — to borrow a phrase from David Graeber.

Santa Fe, Texas, High School

The world of teens has been exquisitely engineered to steal every opportunity for colonizing the chemical reward centers of their brains to provoke endorphin hits, especially the cell-phone realm of social media, which is almost entirely about status competition, much of which revolves around the wild hormonal promptings of teen sexual development — at the same time they are bombarded with commercial messages designed to prey on their fantasies, longings, and perceived inadequacies. All of this produces immersive and incessant melodrama along with untold grievance, envy, frustration, confusion, and rage. And, of course, where the cell-phone universe leaves off, the world of video games begins, so that boys (especially) get to act-out in “play” the extermination of their competitors and foes.

I will venture to say — against the tide of current sexual politics — that adolescence is much tougher for boys these days than it is for girls. Every boy in one way or another faces his archetypal hero’s journey, the hard-wired seeking to become powerful in one way or another, to accomplish something, to prevail over adversaries, to win the goodies of life. This country used to be a place where young men had many useful and practical paths to follow in enacting that eternal script.

That has changed utterly in a couple of generations. Young men are being out-competed by young women who enjoy the advantage of being hard-wired to cooperate with others in the hive-like corporate workplaces that require tractable drones who will just follow instructions. The smart ones can easily avoid pregnancy, too, and still enjoy sex and all the exciting games it entails.

For young men, beyond the repellent corporate world of work are only fantasies about triumphing in pro sports, show business, or the drug trade, with pornography and masturbation in place of the tension-filled process of mate-seeking. There is also plenty of opportunity these days for archetypal acting-out in warfare, but our wars lately are devoid of valorous story-lines, and instead of dying nobly for a cause, our soldiers are more likely to come home with shattered brains and bodies from campaigns of no discernable meaning.

And so high school is the launching pad for all that, though in this era of protracted adolescence, mass murders also take place on college campuses. The part of the forebrain that regulates judgment generally doesn’t complete its development in young men until sometime in their early twenties. And college is swiftly becoming as meaningless as high school, given the economic landscape, and the debt racketeering now deeply associated with higher education.

It’s all part-and-parcel with an American way-of-life that is not what it advertises itself to be. It’s become a cruel hologram of a distant memory of a land that sold its soul for a few decades of comfort and convenience, and ended up in a wilderness of addiction to cheap hits of pleasure. Pleasure is not happiness and the constant seeking to satisfy pleasures is not a journey to meaning. The catch is that this toxic way of life has poor prospects for continuing as a practical matter. History is catching up with our foolishness and history will prove to be even more wrathful than a lonely, confused, seventeen-year-old boy with a pistol and shotgun.


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James Howard Kunstler has worked as a reporter and feature writer for a number of newspapers, and finally as a staff writer for Rolling Stone Magazine. In 1975, he dropped out to write books on a full-time basis. His nonfiction book, "The Long Emergency," describes the changes that American society faces in the 21st century. Discerning an imminent future of protracted socioeconomic crisis, Kunstler foresees the progressive dilapidation of subdivisions and strip malls, the depopulation of the American Southwest, and, amid a world at war over oil, military invasions of the West Coast; when the convulsion subsides, Americans will live in smaller places and eat locally grown food.
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Good stuff. The comment about higher ed being "debt rackeetering" is so true. Also, my granddaughter just graduated from a large HS. Valedictorian, 2nd best whatever you call it...all girls. Think one male made a cameo comment during the ceremony.

My son works at a large firm...executive chef..."high potential" in his last appraisel. Well, they put a board in the cafeteria for the workers to write what their most prized possesion was. He didn't think to filter his response and put down "My M1 Garand". Being a Vietnam vet, etc, taught rifle marksmanship I got it for him as a gift. We target shoot together. Started a firestorm at the firm, the female HR and female supervisor have effectively wrected
his career there. He tried to rationally explain, but minds were made up. He's a cooler head than his old man. I'd have made the 6 o'clock news....Per your inputs about our imminent future, he'll still be eating while those bitches starve. Lol
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Don't you think that we lie to ourselves on a daily basis here, as liberals try to spew gun hatred? Their Hollywood creates violence. Gaming fantasizes it. Their music speaks to it. They refuse to speak to character and promoting a sense of communal nationalism. They like to medicate, condone and justify poor behavior. They ignore the plight of the inner city, but only exploit these all white mass shootings.

Here are the facts. Men, especially young men, are not resilient. They are weak and told to live in protest, over being taught to simply succeed. They are not given the tools. It is not about competition with girls. It is about turning them into girls. The Candace Jenner moment, unfolded, as they seek more attention.

There is no more "strong, silent type", nor the suave James Bond persona. Boys/men are taught to be soft, sensitive and when things don't work in their favor... speak up, speak out. When things still don't work in their favor, emotional outbursts become justified, become the norm. Gun violence is then but an outcome of the left. And the left creates a reaction from the right, who rebuts further creating protest and division.

We are weakened, when we are divided. We are further weakened, when we are diluted. We are weakened when we are medically dependent. Weakened (and confused) when Hollywood becomes someone's realities. Our heroes are fictitious or idiotic performers. Leadership exploits the working and the poor, knowing they can control a populous

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"It’s become a cruel hologram of a distant memory of a land that sold its soul for a few decades of comfort and convenience, and ended up in a wilderness of addiction to cheap hits of pleasure."

It was not the land or the people who devised public indoctrination but are so-called leaders. Always looking out for "we the people".

" But there’s a reason. There’s a reason. There’s a reason for this, there’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason it will never, ever, EVER be fixed.
It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.
Because the owners, the owners of this country don't want that. I'm talking about the real owners now, the BIG owners! The Wealthy… the REAL owners! The big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions.
They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying, lobbying, to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I'll tell you what they don’t want:
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests.
That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting f_cked by a system that threw them overboard 30 f_cking years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club. "
George Carlin
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Good stuff. The comment about higher ed being "debt rackeetering" is so true. Also, my granddaughter just graduated from a large HS. Valedictorian, 2nd best whatever you call it...all girls. Think one male made a cameo comment during the ceremony.  Read more
aapd05t - 5/22/2018 at 8:48 PM GMT
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