Shooting is Business, and Business is Good

[WilliamPitt]

5. "It is enough"

It is enough. We have come to a place of definitions after this last, latest outrage. We are strong enough, and wise enough, and good enough to encompass this horror and bend it into something that serves us as a nation. No greater monument could stand over the graves of the lost than one that reads, "From This, No More."

"The so-called American Way begins to seem like a dike made of cheap cement," wrote Hunter S. Thompson almost 50 years ago. "America has been breeding mass anomie since the end of World War II. It is not a political thing, but the sense of new realities, of urgency, anger and sometimes desperation in a society where even the highest authorities seem to be grasping at straws."

It is the guns. And it is this nation's pathetic approach to mental health issues in an age where the basic facts of the times are enough alone to derange people. It is the way we medicate ourselves in an orbit of profit-motives that says more pills are better. It is the way we exist as a nation that has been at permanent war for more than 70 years, the way violence is our calling card, the way we spend trillions on killing while neglecting and ignoring our own. It is our myths, and it is our realities.

But it is the guns.

And we have to start somewhere.