Simple Thought

It's completely unsurprising that the hardest part about adjusting back to American life is getting used to the daily mass shootings.

"mass panic there for a good hour and a half"

At Syracuse University, students are literally fleeing due to a toxic combination of racism and gun-nuttery:

"'In those two to three minutes, students had already gotten a hold of it,' Hatchett said. 'We started getting panicked messages from students, who again, want to know, "Are we on lockdown?" "Do we need to evacuate?" "I called my mom, she wants me to get on a flight, like, right away."' So it was almost mass panic there for a good hour and a half before we finally figured out that everything was calm and safe.

'There wasn’t any concern that there was an active shooter in the building, but there was a concern that it would be happening sometime today. At that point, a lot of people just wanted to get as far away from here as they could.'"

This is a quality university in what is usually known as a fairly safe area.  This is life in America ca. 2019, where a mix of racism and racist ideology masquerading as "muh free speech" and the ability of anyone, regardless of criminal or psychological background, to buy a military-grade assault weapon on a whim, has allowed its citizens to have such unprecedented "freedoms" and "rights."  (To be shot in the face by an angry white guy, perhaps.)

Other countries simply tremble in envy of us, I'm sure of it.

March For Our Lives

I'm cynical by nature, and this is obviously not an era of optimism in America, or anywhere else in the world.

So I'll take my moments of inspiration as they come.

"to see the world without us"

Tim Kreider on the state of America post-Parkland:

"One of my students once asked me, when I was teaching the writing of political op-ed essays, why adults should listen to anything young people had to say about the world. My answer: because they’re afraid of you. They don’t understand you. And they know you’re going to replace them.

My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down — all those cringing provincials who still think climate change is a hoax, that being transgender is a fad or that 'socialism' means purges and re-education camps. Rid the world of all our outmoded opinions, vestigial prejudices and rotten institutions. Gender roles as disfiguring as foot-binding, the moribund and vampiric two-party system, the savage theology of capitalism — rip it all to the ground. I for one can’t wait till we’re gone. I just wish I could live to see the world without us."

A-fucking-men.