Bare Ruined Choirs

        As the USA's democracy project sinks further into chaos each day, the high school gun reformers are receiving a free graduate education about its fault lines. The cocktail of claimed virtue (read James Comey), received religion, imperial military power, irrepressible sex, and Wall Street influence peddling, provide a priceless learning curve. Lesson one is the gun violence issue is already off the table. Lesson two is that since no one has constructed plausible solutions to this mess young generations are going to have to build them from the ground up.

        If there's to be summer school this year it better be spent on that construction project. The ground is littered with lessons and obstacles. In Silicon Valley amidst all its riches inequality is growing. In 2014 the top 5 percent of the population earned an annual $428,729, increasing by an additional $60,686 in 2016 alone, while the earnings of the lowest 20 percent increased only $1,726. [Silicon Valley Index 2018].

        Social critic Pankaj Mishra characterizes this new reality where "the old style racial segregation has been replaced by sharply defined zones of prosperity and destitution." 

         Alongside this is the modern illness that confuses data with moral principles. This digital mythic obsession, with its big paydays, can be fairly described as the replacement for religion's tendency toward magical thinking. Since everyone is quoting Reinhold Niebuhr these days the irony he often pointed to is in this case the hard reality that the people shooting at young people may be the closest thing to being their allies.

        Such unfathomable truth at least provides clues J.K. Rowling could appreciate including what witchery led us to accept that economic growth would magically cure inequality. In Republican legislatures across the country this absurdity is being laid to rest as tax cuts for the rich impoverish state budgets.  

        Youthful political practitioners should note how denial often corrupts perception. We can note that the evil of Native American genocide is only cured by not remembering; that the continuing evil of racial segregation is often cured by blindness; that the deterioration of life in jobless communities cannot be cured except by Darwinian fantasies about survival of the fittest. The old fascist dream is risen again.

         Shakespeare gives proportion to the stakes in the loss of democratic practices:

That time of year...When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang....

Which by and by black night doth take away.

        As it turns out then, to get gun control requires the major revolution that the resignation of the Republican party leader Paul Ryan may foretell. Meaning new generations whose illusions have been shredded by bullets turning unabashedly to a lifetime of political engagement, fortified by the sure and certain truth that to share the next meal the whole community must decide. 

        Neither wizards, nor miracles, nor data can replace that common good. Until then the men and women here and around the world who need a share of our bread will be shooting.  

 

[Shakespeare Sonnett 73]