In Thine Severe Mistrust

 

“It seems that some publishers attempted to slap a coat of paint on an old house built on the foundation of Common Core, and indoctrinating concepts like race essentialism, especially, bizarrely, for elementary school students,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as Florida rejected a 41% of math textbooks submitted by publishers in part because they “contained prohibited subjects,” including critical race theory.

We sit on the precipice of thermonuclear war. Ultraviolence in a major food/fossil fuel producing region (Ukraine and Russia) and the pent-up demand, which exploded as the lingering effects of the pandemic subsided, combined to create the highest rate of inflation in over forty years. The monthly cost of carrying a normal mortgage doubled literally overnight. Radical right-wing policies – from restricting established voting and abortion rights to baseless culture wars and censorship, accelerated by a growing support for armed insurrection – have moved us one giant step toward autocracy. And the Supreme Court has become an ultra-conservative legislature with no appellate checks and balances, hell-bent on repealing decades of expanding individual rights.

Those at the top have never made so much money. Those at the bottom have not fared this badly since the Great Depression of the 1930s. We live in an era of blame and polarization, where logical legislation is stymied if sponsored by the “opposition” party. There are red Americans. There are blue Americans. There is no “loyal opposition.” And there are very few truly neutral Americans. So few, just Americans. We mistrust. We fear. But mostly, we hate. Even Putin’s war has failed to unite us. Are we irretrievably and permanently a divided land?

Within this toxic combination, we watch mass shootings, follow-home violent robberies, flash mob invasions of retail markets, absurd levels of gun violence, now including military grade assault weapons (easily converted to fully automatic) and more guns than this nation has ever had before, passing through the permeable walls between our international boundaries (guns going south) and open borders between states… between states that want to control gun ownership and those that wish to expand it. The new normal. Ghost guns, AR-15s, large-clip automatic pistols. Murder rates in almost every major city hit new peaks… with hope for a maybe?

The April17th New York Times newsletter (by German Lopez) summarized what their editors believe are the underlying vectors of rising animosity, criminality, gun violence that clearly illustrates how a Supreme Court misinterpretation of the Second Amendment (Heller vs District of Columbia, 2008) opened the flood gates to an explosion of gun homicides:

“Three explanations help explain the increase in violence. The Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns disrupted all aspects of life, including the social services that can tame crime and violence. The high-profile police killings of 2020 and the protests that followed strained police-community relations. And Americans bought a record number of guns in recent years.

“Another explanation… ties these issues together: a growing sense of social discord and distrust. As Americans lose faith in their institutions and each other, they are more likely to lash out — sometimes in violent ways, Randolph Roth, a crime historian at Ohio State University, told me.

“Besides Covid and police brutality, the country’s increasingly polarized politics and poor economic conditions have also fueled this discord. That helps explain the murder spike, as well as recent increases in drug addiction and overdoses, mental health problems, car crashes and even confrontations over masks on airplanes.

“But given the shootings of the past two weeks, I want to step back and focus on violent crime trends in particular… Experts pointed to several reasons for concern: not only the headline-making tragedies, but also continued murder rate increases in some cities and the persistence of problems that contributed to more violent crime in the first place. But experts also see some potentially hopeful signs: recent decreases in murder rates in other cities, the easing of Covid-related disruptions and growing distance from the more chaotic police-community relations of 2020.” Exactly what is the stake that the bottom of our economic ladder have in “America”? What do they have left to lose? A hot, very very hot, summer looms. As midterms approach, politicians in red states are digging in their heels, and very Putin-like, doubling down on mythology to sustain a severe shift to white evangelical minority rule. Will the violence subsize… or is this just the beginning? Can polarization get any worse?            I’m Peter Dekom, and as we supply Ukraine with arms to protect their democracy, we clearly watching our own most fragile democracy cracking, perhaps permanently, at the seams.