At the juncture of Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, a collision with the newest school shooting, this one in Parkland, Florida.
For now I won’t mention any kind of response in terms of firearms control. There seems to be little chance for fruitful dialogue here.
But it must be said that acts of horrifying cruelty, whether physical, sexual or both, are not without antecedent: there are always prior development and reinforcement.
We have permitted the immersion of our youth into a media bath of explicit, gory violence on one hand, and propogandized images of unstructured sexuality on the other.
In other words, we have aided and abetted the reinforcement of cruel, abusive behavior, and the desensitization to a river of images that should produce PTSD in any sane adult in a less sophisticated age.
We have not only aided this comprehensive program, we have fiercely protected it in the name of political shibboleths.
And we adults have demanded our personal rights to behave with discourtesy, incivility, free expression of anger that ranges from brooding to outburst, contempt for any and all disagreement. Let alone how we have adopted cynical, vulgar and denunciatory forms in our everyday speech.
And we fools have called this "freedom." Even we religious types have taken to the grammar and syntax of the gang-hardened streets.
Forget the guns for now. If you want to see less school shootings, less teachers who have to shield kids from a lead eruption of an AR-15,
then for God’s sake, and the children’s, stop the cruelty in you and around you. Stop getting mad and aroused.
Make peace. Be meek, pure in heart. Hunger and thirst for a better kingdom.
This Lent, look for true beauty, work for wisdom, pour your ego out in love, and make them real.
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