Broken

It’s the aftermath of another mass shooting, so America is currently engaged in our favorite kabuki: Liberals shouting about more gun control, Conservatives shouting about arming all citizens, Technocratic centrists (and other professional point-missers) talking about mental illness as the real issue. Meanwhile, nothing will change, the outrage machine will move on to another topic, and we’ll be back here again in about six months. And as we spin our wheels, the elephant in the room continues to deposit large piles of shit in the corner…

We live in a country that values property above people. We live in a country in which those at the top use state-sanctioned violence to protect their wealth (We live in a country in which more people are killed by the police per year (907 as of this writing) than have been killed by mass shooters since 1982 (581)). We live in a country with staggering amounts of wealth, and unconscionable amounts of childhood poverty. We live in a country where the first question most people ask when you meet them at a party is “So what do you do?” We live in a country without a birth-rite to healthcare, paid vacation, paid sick leave, paid parental leave. We live in a country that was built on genocide and slavery, yet refuses to recognize, let alone grapple with that history. We live in a country that LITERALLY BOMBED A FUCKING DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS HOSPITAL!!

That is to say, we live under Capitalism. And under Capitalism, human life is nothing more than an input. We are stripped of our essential nature as cooperators and community seekers; of artists and creators. We are taught scarcity. We are taught that the only way to soothe our existential angst is to buy more baubles.

Is it any wonder that under this system of hierarchies, we become fearful and paranoid? That we clutch covetously to “our” piece of the world. That other people are expendable? Is it, then, any wonder that in brains so conditioned to hopelessness, to fear, to rage, that some brains will commit atrocities? That they will dehumanize others and snuff out lives as callously as they themselves have been dehumanized by a system that sees them as an interchangeable cog in a value extraction machine? Contentious internet blogger Freddie DeBoer thinks so:

men kill because they think it makes them powerful; they desire power because their culture teaches them that if they don’t have it, they will be preyed on, humiliated, discarded. It’s the weak who feel the need to tell you that they’re strong, after all; the strong never feel the need to prove it. Fear is the source of this anger. We attack that root fear by building a society based on the notion that we are all responsible for each other, that we all are born in the business of helping each other survive and excel.

Unless we craft a society that truly values our unique humanity, we will never cure our fundamental illness. We’ll be back at this place again to mourn another tragedy as we overlook that shitty elephant in the room, and wonder why we never quite feel fully human.