Kootenay Crust

By Ian Cobb

I love America.

But I despair for her.

There have been more than 350 mass shootings in America in 2015.

The most recent shocker was 14 people gunned down and a further 14 injured at a social welfare centre in San Bernardino, Calif. This shooting came two days after a psycho killed three and injured nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo.

That spree followed an Oct. 1 bloodbath in Roseburg, Ore., where nine more people were murdered at Umpqua Community College. Another nine souls were taken from the earth on June 1 in Charleston, SC, this time while worshipping at their church.

Politicians and the evil corporations that own them are trying to deflect America’s sickness by pointing shaky fingers across the Atlantic Ocean and crying “Syria; terrorists; ISIS!”

Outgoing President Barack Obama is once again correctly point out how America must find a way to curb its bloodlust and some form of gun control would be a good start.

Sadly, Obama has been screaming into a vortex where sound is obscured by gunfire and shouts of government control and loss of freedom by gun nuts who hide behind the Second Amendment, something created when Americans used muskets to keep the British at bay.

The amendment essentially states: ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.’

The situation in America, as of today, is this: Gun nuts say guns have to stay in order for the people to protect themselves from… the US Government, as well as all the evil monsters out there who want to storm their homes and run off with their gun collections.

People have a right to bear arms, written in the US Constitution and the proliferation of firearm ownership, legal and illegal, is so far over the top of sanity that the thought to removing weapons from people makes the average American grow even more paranoid. Like out-of-control addicts, they do not recognize they have a problem nor do they feel they need to take steps to bring things under control.

It is true that America’s massive criminal population is better armed than most police forces, so for the average American, the idea of giving up their arms so criminals would be better armed than them is most unsettling. At the same time, police forces have never been more ‘under fire’ for their use of firearms on the population. It seems every couple of days we hear about another (usually unarmed) citizen being murdered by a stressed out cop or two. And who doubts that American cops are stressed out? Think about the nightmares they have to deal with on a basic day on the job.

Around and around America goes, from one mass shooting to the next with the same arguments: guns good; guns bad. The arguing stinks from the bullshit splattered all over the words used, such as “guns don’t kill people; people kill people” and from wealthy, out-of-touch gun nuts such as Ted (shut up and play yer guitar) Nugent saying gun control efforts are nothing more than evil liberal weenies trying to ruin America’s greatness. I wonder what Ted would say if a close family member was blown away while sauntering through a community college or fast food outlet?

Wait, I know what Ted would say – the same imbecilic, reckless and ultimately lethally dangerous crap that oozes out of National Rifle Association types’ pie holes whenever another loser loses it: “If only EVERYONE was armed and everyone wasn’t a sissy and everyone just opened fire! That would have stopped buddy in his tracks I tell you what, pass the ammo, wang dang sweet wild game poontang.”

Yet for all that idiotic, nutless posturing, not a man or woman jack of those problem pushing pundits ever look to a country like Canada, where people are generally heavily armed if they want to be; either illegally or through the gun control process, and ask, “Why aren’t Canadians killing one another like us?”

You know why we don’t? We aren’t insane. America has, collectively, gone insane. She’s Col. Kurtz in Cambodia the day before Martin Sheen butchers her like a cow.

A popular definition of insanity wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein “is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” No matter who said it, the definition rings true and it applies completely to the pat arguments flying about again following ‘San Bernardino.’

At what point will Americans stand up and say, “enough is enough?”

I fear they won’t – ever. They are too far gone. Americans need to know that the rest of the world views them as certifiable nuts thrumming fingers on their lips and singing “lalalalalala.”

But at least half of them don’t give a shit about that. Their insanity includes raging narcissism and squealing entitlement never earned or deserved.

The brainwashing that has infected America since the introduction of movies, television and the Internet with its endless hate propaganda memes designed to enrage the least intelligent or angriest, forwarded along by out-of-control pharmaceutical abuse and shrieking paranoia drummed up by corporate media assigned the tasks of distracting the masses, has taken such deep root in that once great nation that nothing short of institutionalization will bring about the cure needed.

If you are, at this point, thinking I am being alarmist, let me introduce you to Donald Trump.

Trump remains a serious contender for the Republican Party presidential nomination. As a president, Donald Trump would make George W. Bush look like a chin-stroking intellectual puffing on the ganj. If elected, a small number of his ‘promises’ would turn America into a blackened wasteland. Internal and external violence would reach new lows and a naziesque vibe would obliterate whatever little good is left in America’s international reputation.

The streets will run with blood if the ugly American is allowed to break loose.

Trump’s reckless verbal diarrhea is already inspiring a new generation of angry young men who can’t process any form of truth or reality that doesn’t correspond to their limited intellects (much like ISIS). Raged onward by testosterone and the inability to get laid, these angry young men are the root and heart of all extremism – not just in America but the world-over. If the angry loons who join ISIS could only get laid on a regular basis, there would be no ISIS.

Wildly out-of-touch clowns like Donald Trump don’t offer answers. They create excuses for their weapons manufacturing, oil extracting, pharmaceutical producing and societal infrastructure building companies to proceed to make more cash with the least amount of expense and piss off more people in nations Trump’s followers have never heard of before or could come close to spelling correctly.

America’s runaway loss of value of human life, evidenced everyday with more shootings, slaughters and insanity, is the clearest sign that the nation has gone completely off the deep end.

From our perches up here in the Great White North, we feel for you America. You are our closest friend; you are family.

We have our problems with violence, too, but it is a rock thrown into a calm pool compared to the tsunami scouring its way across your human condition.

I don’t say this to be smug. I say this because I love America. I love the old Disneyfied idea of America – personified by the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

That poem, New Colossus, spoke to the progressing America that was smothered and reduced in Ronald Reagan’s trickle down 1980s. It seems nowadays the Statue of Liberty should be warning people about moving to a nation that is overcome with so much hatred, anger and a staunch refusal to accept facts that they’re better off staying where they are from.

America, like Rome, has gone insane with excesses, delusions of grandeur and self-aggrandizement. It also proceeds under the assumption that it is a free nation, but it is only free to those who can afford it, which is a miniscule percentage of the population. Why are people going nuts? Wake up!

And like Rome and other once bloated empires, America shall fall. How far depends upon how the American people react to the news that they’ve gone insane. If they seek help, they will rise again. If they get angry and lash out – they’re completely eff you see kayed.

And that would be too bad. There is much to love about America, including her people and natural beauty.

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