I love this country. I really do. It's hard for me to not love America. This is a country with a lot going for it. We're a country that can kick the entire world's ass at any sport at any given time just because we feel like it. Case in point: soccer isn't even a top 5 sport here and we still have one of the top ranked national teams in the world. We constantly come up with new gadgets and gizmos and scientific breakthroughs. We're a country that the rest of the world looks up to. With so many things going right, how come we can't seem to get rid of 2 glaring wrongs? I'm talking about our overabundance of gun violence and our rampant sexism.
As I write this, we're in the midst of another mass shooting at a school that didn't need to happen and probably wouldn't have happened somewhere like Australia. This time it's a whiny, rich 22 year old, black andAsian hating racist with Aspergers, which is surely going to be used as a way to justify the shootings. We're not going to look at the 140 page manifesto where he basically plans out every single event. We're not going to follow his online activities where we find out that he sympathizes with "men's rights activists" and that he basically hated any woman who didn't immediately throw themselves at him because his dad was an assistant director on "The Hunger Games". Instead of all of that, we will just chalk it up to him being mentally disturbed as if this takes away from the fact that he planned out several crimes and intended on targeting several people.
If we're going to shoo away this latest mass murder by saying "Oh, he was crazy and you can't stop crazy.", maybe we should come up with ways to stop crazy from going crazy on us normal Americans. How can this be done? It's fairly simple if you ask me: make it more difficult to get a hold of weapons. I'm not saying that we should ban guns, I'm saying that we should come up with a process to weed out potential psychopaths. Maybe the background checks should go deeper than just criminal history and look at mental health history. Why would we let a man currently receiving therapy for his mental problems have access to a gun? You wouldn't let a known drunk drive your car, so why let a chronically depressed and suicidal man have a gun? That, to me seems backwards. If we aren't going to do anything at all about mental health in this country, we should at least make sure that they don't get guns. Of course, knowing how much this country bows down to the NRA, everything in this blog wont happen and we'll answer this latest mass shooting by asking for fewer restrictions on guns and the ability to carry assault rifles in hospitals, churches and bars.
Also, if I'm going to keep talking about Elliot Rodger, I may as well point out that he was a sexist dick who felt entitled to sex with any woman he deemed worthy of being near him. This type of thinking isn't a trait of some sort of autism, but really something ingrained in him culturally. Sexism and misogyny are rampant in societies all around the planet, and sometimes it takes extreme cases to even get people to bring up the issue at all. It goes deeper than Rick Ross putting in a line about date rape in an otherwise forgettable song. It's deeper than Daniel Tosh bombing during a set and resorting to rape jokes for shock laughs. If you want to see how bad misogyny is in America, look past offensive song lyrics and bad comedy and look at our politics. We regulate women more than we regulate guns or even food. We choose what type of medicine they can take, what they can't take, what they can do with their bodies and how much they get paid for doing the same work as men, and it turns out that all of those things are horrible. We've essentially outlawed abortion in many parts of this country, legalized a 2 tier wage system that shortchanges 51% of the population and have even tried to change the definition of rape because it made a few old men uncomfortable. None of this helps America at all and it's about control. It's about old men, and idiots, wanting to have control over people who they see as less than human and incapable of making their own decisions, and it's this type of pathology, rhetoric and policy from people who are supposed to be our leaders that leads to guys like the entitled Elliot Rodger feeling like he has imminent domain over the bodies of all women.
In conclusion, as long as this country is filled with idiots, nothing will be done about our broken mental health system, the easy access to dangerous weapons or the dangerous sexism. We can blame who we want to blame on this most recent tragedy but the fact of the matter is that we're all to blame on some level for voting for idiots who have the power to change 2 of 3 of those things but don't while not even bothering to address everyday sexism.
Monday, May 26, 2014
The picture will never change
1 comments:
Great post.
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