While everybody was busy planning their beautiful graduation parties, yet another school shooting went down. The second one in two weeks. I’m sure somebody noticed. I didn’t. It’s barely newsworthy anymore. Just a side article to quickly scan over on your way to read about Trump’s latest gaff and the new male celebrity accused of sexual assault.
Why should anyone care? We know it won’t help anything. The nation can do little more than pretend to care at this point. Oh, not because we’re selfish — no, we’re just too smart. It only took us a mere decade of social media to realize that “thoughts and prayers” were about as meaningful as the Diet Coke with your Double Whopper value meal. As tends to happen, the repetition has us all growing numb.
But even pretending to care is getting hard, isn’t it? I think so. It’s exhausting. You hear about a shooting, and you think, “Great, now I have to get online and argue about guns again. For another week or two.” I’m getting tired just thinking about all the gun-talking I’ll have to do.
It has to be doubly difficult for the right wing. Because they have to keep coming up with new scapegoats to pin the blame on to diffuse the gun control conversation. Liberals have it easy. They already know where they’re going with this. They can practically cut and paste their diatribes from last time. You know, the standard level of liberal action.
We did away with the waiting period, too. No, not the waiting period to purchase a firearm — the old waiting period we used to enforce after a shooting before it was acceptable to start having the gun conversation. Sort of the “mourning period.” We got rid of that in a hurry. No more mourning here. There’s debating to be done! That really essential kind of bickering that leads us to absolutely nowhere. It’s important we get right on that.
I hear some crazies yelling that we need to “take action.” But that seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to for something we don’t really care about. Besides, what would we do? The news is required by law to sensationalize these incidents. It’s crucial to their bottom line. We can’t put stricter regulations on obtaining guns — the second amendment forbids that with zero ambiguity. We can’t beef up security inside the schools themselves, as that’s simply too costly and definitely ineffective.
We already know that absolutely nothing will work. Because we’ve already tried so many things, and they’ve all failed. Well, we tried them in our minds, anyway, and they all sounded like pretty bad ideas. So there’s really no point in doing anything.
I suppose we should be more flexible. But we’re Americans, and it’s a well-known fact that Americans are not terribly flexible. Only about two percent of us can actually touch our toes.
The key thing to remember is that this cannot happen to any of us or our own children. The entire nation outside of one particular school came out just fine. And while we’re all a little bit sad about tragedies of the sort, nobody is really afraid that it might happen to them. Certainly not afraid enough to meet our fellow Americans halfway — compromise in an effort to take real action that could elicit real change. No one is that afraid. I know I’m not.
Holding tightly to our stances on wedge issues and creating enemies on the other side of the aisle — that’s what’s important. That and erasing our brain’s hard drive every other week. These things have worked fine for us so far, and as I said, we don’t really care anyway. Why should we?
Yes, it’s probably for the best that we all just hold our ground until this all blows over again, and we can get back to our normal lives: watching sports and reality television; grilling out and having an adult beverage; taking our kids to get ice cream.
Everything is going to be just fine. I’m confident another shooting isn’t right around the corner. I’m sure of it.
*Opinions expressed may not reflect Mustache Wars