House of Eratosthenes

Let us dispose, I say, of the following bits of sticky persistent nonsense. I can see here there’s work for me to do, because I’m seeing lots of people crying out for “new solutions that will work,” and then answering their own plaintive pleas with a lot of garbage that everyone’s heard lots of times before. Into the breach I bravely step.

1. This is unacceptable! We have no place for this!

Congratulations on the good intentions. Like any decent, not-crazy person, I wish you luck in what you’re trying to do.

But what I see here, is what it is. More of that dreadful mannerism. The indignant, matronly yard-duty teacher talking down to the dimmest third-grader in the class, letting him know she has had plenty enough of his crap. These shootings are overwhelmingly male-centric, and if we’re going to take a look at something to try to make this the last one, we need to be looking at how we get along with the males…which we haven’t been doing. The message to younger, developing males has been one of: Finger-waggling fists-on-hips nanny nanny boo boo stuff. You’re a pain, my approval decides everything, you can do nothing, you’ll never amount to anything. You are ineffectual, or at least, should be. As the profile of the school shooter develops and sharpens, we consistently see it’s a disengaged male who’s been made to feel ineffective, and this is his way of saying back to society at large, “Oh yeah?”

There is also the problem of accuracy. We do have a place for this violence. We’ve been making one. These shootings happen often at places that have strict anti-gun policies, so that shooters know they won’t run into armed resistance. They don’t want anyone shooting back, and we have been accommodating them.

2. What we’ve been doing up until now isn’t working! When are we going to finally do what we all know we have to do?

What we have been doing is cobbling together in each state an unworkable, byzantine briar patch of zany gun laws. Anti gun activists, like our predator President, like to say stuff like this as if they’re only just now being empowered, potentially, to constrain and curtail lawful gun owners. We’ve already been doing that. That’s what isn’t working.

3. We have to make sure people get the mental health services they need.

Such services are provided by practitioners, and practitioners carry with them a variety of different agendas. To say “more services” and then just leave it at that, is irresponsible, especially now when we know the practitioners have been “treating” kids who start out without anything innately wrong with them. “First do no harm,” remember that? It used to be, as they say, “a thing.” Primum non nocere. The fact of the matter is, too many boys-becoming-men are brought to adulthood without any vision of ever being functional or whole, and “get counseling” when there’s nothing wrong with you, just exacerbates the problem. How about…teach young males what we teach young females? That nobody’s perfect, you can be anything you want to be when you grow up, and you have within you already what it takes to make the world better? You’ll notice it’s popular to say that to girls. And grown women rarely shoot up schools.

4. Toxic masculinity!

The “Morgan Rule” is my invention: “If I’m gonna be accused, I wanna be guilty.” But let’s be clear, I only invented the words to stitch the ideas, which came along way before I did, together into a coherent statement. Right or wrong, this is how people function, and it has always been how people function. If the verdict is already in on me behaving badly, I have no incentive to behave any better. Anti-masculinity activists, you just got done telling a whole generation of males that they’re monsters just because they’re males. Now you’re wondering why they’re shooting up schools. Hmm.

As noted above, our sadly acquired cumulative wisdom continues to reinforce the observation that these are ungrounded, unattached, disoriented boys-becoming-men. Amid all this talk of “sensible gun laws,” can someone please enlighten me with the complete inventory of our recent efforts to ground, attach and orient growing boys? I’m sure the localized and isolated efforts exist here and there, but that’s clearly not enough. What about the widespread, intensive, sustained efforts to ground them, attach them and orient them?

As noted earlier, there’s a lot of social upward-mobility involved in plying encouraging messages onto the female; hardly anybody ever thinks of doing that with males. Make her feel “powerful”; make sure she “thrives.” Also noted earlier, chicks aren’t shooting up schools, it remains a dude thing. Once again: Hmm.

5. Medication to make his brain work right…

Actually, we saw our current spate of these terrible, violent acts after you amateur chemists got super slap-happy with your faddish psychotropic drugs. Some, like me, have been asking the question of how these drug patients should ever learn how to function in society without a constant dosage year to year, day to day…y’all never did get around to giving us a straight answer. Maybe the shooters have finally given us the answer! It’s not an answer I like too much.

There. Now that I have “fact checked” you, let’s go ahead and have our discussion about what’s broken, and how to fix it. Just don’t go swaggering around Beto Style, like you’re the genius who’s finally going to restore sanity and deliver us to peace, love and harmony, after we empower you to do so at long last…when the reality is, we’ve already been doing things your way.

I can’t put into words how scary it is, watching these rotten old ideas dressed up in new activewear, and paraded around under this phony pretense of “Now let’s do something about it” as if we’ve been sitting on the sidelines for years and years just letting these young men shoot people. And now Sparky here is going to offer up his revolutionary new idea: Make everybody else defenseless. It’s scarier than — an active shooter, barging through the door, crazy as a fox, looking for his next target, making eye contact. Because that guy, at least, would be intentionally shooting things.

These assholes are more like a toddler with a flamethrower who hasn’t quite figured out the connection between the hot bright stuff coming out the muzzle, and the trigger he’s pressing.

I can understand coming up with silly stuff in the immediate aftermath of a terrible event like this, letting the emotions gain the upper hand. It’s an emotionally charged thing.

But I can’t excuse it. That’s different from understanding it. The whole phenomenon carries all the tell-tale signs of a societal problem that’s getting worse because it isn’t being handled the right way. And these local-vocals, whether they realize it or not, are just reciting the wrong-way we’ve been handling it up until now, in a different tone of voice. If we conclude they just don’t know what they’re saying, we conclude as charitably as we possibly can, for the alternative explanation is an intent of harm. But either way, they haven’t got the right idea, and they’re still monopolizing the sound space which is something that doesn’t have to happen. That part reflects poorly on everybody else.

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Before Discussing School Shootings Any Further…Thursday, May 26th, 2022

Before Discussing School Shootings Any Further…
Thursday, May 26th, 2022