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 Children who survive a school shooting know what War is like.  


They are being initiated into American life and society. There is War going on in this country – whether we want to believe it or not. America is at War with itself. A war declared and waged by the country’s addiction to violence and guns, to automatic rifles designed for war and mass killings, to money and power. It is a suicidal war. And we are held hostage. Those military weapons are manufactured for War, and every day they kill random civilians, children, grandmas, nurses, fathers, shoppers. Just as it is happening in the War Zones around the world. We might think War is far away, but no – War has come home to America, where everyone is basically free to kill.

I am relieved to hear true outrage and fury from many corners – finally, finally. This is utterly necessary. To let children to be slaughtered – sit by and not be upset? To allow more guns than people in the land of the free, and still want to increase armament of teachers? America has already more guns per capita than countries who are at War. Now everyone is throwing around these statistics. But do they shock Americans enough? There is a Darkness. Children are willingly Sacrificed. Land theft, genocide, slavery, exploitation, segregation, racism, corporate pollution, state murder, inequality, mass-incarceration, are all interconnected on a historical thread in this Darkness. We speak about reckoning, it's overtime. All of American society a War Zone, armed to its teeth. 

 

No other country in the world – not yet at war – wants to follow down America’s road to hell. We definitely are not a moral leader or an inspiration to the world, but rather a HUGE warning sign!!! Besides the utter sadness of it all, our helplessness is almost unbearable. That’s what War feels like…. we are already in it.

 

Here my flowers to help us mourn, memorialize, and keep hope alive… 

In Memory of the many Lives lost at recent massacres:

the Buffalo shooting, the Laguna Woods shooting, the Uvalde shooting, and many more…. 

Comments

Alex K said…
Hard to read what you have written. To see us in America being in a war. To see into the Darkness of our legacy and not just the accomplishments. To think that it is in this refusal to look in the darkness that is intimately related to the addiction to guns and violence. Painful and heartbreakingly sad. Yet as hard as it is, it sheds light on why there is this crazy, literally psychotic attachment and fixation on the part of so many americans to guns. For it is at this time when the dark things of our country's history and present are bursting into more general awareness that people feel more threatened. I think it is necessary not only to let our heart break in the face of these terrible losses but to let the outrage and pain motivate us to sustain over time what it will take to stop these massacres and transform our culture.
May 28, 2022 at 3:40 PM
aysha said…
It has become popular in my circles to talk about US violence in the context of settler colonialism and imperialism - that the country literally only exists through ongoing land theft, cultural and biological genocide, and other forms of nonconsent should make it clear that violence is fundamental to the US. Liberals and conservatives alike advocate various different forms of violence in the hope that they will protect some noble core in some fantasy US past ("great again"?), but their argument is incoherent. Since moving to "California" and witnessing the leadership of Indigenous peoples here, I have become so convinced that there is no desirable future for the US and that other futures exist for us beyond the structures of violence that have become so normalized.

I realize this is a very heady response to an issue that requires feeling, sensitivity... of course this is what women of color have been advocating for decades/ever. But learning to feel is so difficult having grown up in this culture, and although I am young I feel that this desensitization has already penetrated me so deeply. The young people need to learn from you elders and the arts of feeling that you have maintained throughout so many years and waves of violence...
May 28, 2022 at 7:18 PM
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