Did you watch President Biden’s big gun control speech last night? He’s not a great orator like Pericles of ancient Athens, or Abraham Lincoln, or Winston Churchill. But, my God, does he really have to be? “How many more innocent American lives must be taken before we say enough?” Isn’t that enough to bring about action?
My son, who is in his early twenties, refused to watch. Not because he doesn’t care, but because he cares too much. “It would just depress me, because I know nothing will change,” he said to me. Who would dare contract him?
In the mid-1970s, the ultra-Communist Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia and proceeded to murder two million Cambodians, one-third of the little country’s entire population. You sometimes see this unfathomable horror described as an “auto-genocide,” because the perpetrators were of the same ethnic group as their victims. We are in the early stages, perhaps, of something similar here in America, “the last best hope of man on earth,” as mass shooting massacres have now become a daily occurrence. Just in the past couple of days, we have had four murder victims in a Tulsa hospital, and five dead in Texas, including four children, at the hands of an escaped prisoner, who like the Oklahoma perpetrator had no trouble getting hold of an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. Last night, President Biden eloquently called for banning these weapons, the only purpose of which is to kill human beings. In response, unnamed terrorist-backing Republican staffers are threatening to blow up the Senate negotiations to do anything, anything at all, to slow the pace of the all-American massacres. Tucker Carlson has threatened to start a civil war if Congress dares pass any gun control measures. Your menace falls flat, TuKKKer, because the civil war is already here.
The MAGAs thought they were clever, pretending not to hear the unspoken “too” at the end of the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” working themselves into a rage at the very idea that anyone could say that African Americans are human beings deserving of the right to life, making believe that people who say this are actually saying that only Black lives matter. “Blue Lives Matter,” they retorted, as if the lives of police officers are opposed to the lives of Black people, and “All Lives Matter.” My wife noticed the truth: No lives matter, here in America.
Emanuel Goldstein 