“The Kids Are Alright”
The Who
The kids are doing a fine job of re-alerting everyone to the problem of the weapons business when it comes to private citizen ownership of a gun and the thousands we kill with them. But we need those kids and especially their parents and grandparents to wake up and face up to the very public social problem of the weapons and hundreds of thousands of murders we all pay for under the misnomer of defense.
The Pentagon, the weapons industry and our military kill far more people than the NRA and we all pay for it, not as individuals shopping for a personal weapon but as taxpayers in an alleged democracy who foot the trillion dollar bills for warfare and mass murders that have finally come home to us through retaliatory acts of terrorism. While lauding our kids for doing what our alleged democratic government should be doing, we adults might give a moment to stopping the mass murders and destruction of nations conducted by a military allegedly defending us in other nations thousands of miles from home, while it, and we, remain helpless to stop private and public murders in our own country. Make you wonder? It should.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. That wants it down.”—Robert Frost
Seems to depend on where the wall is, who builds it and who is being kept out or in by it. Many Americans are upset by the proposal to build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border to keep Mexican people from coming into the country without legal processing. And some Americans are very upset about the wall in Israel that keeps Palestinians locked both in and out of their own homeland to protect Israelis the way early Americans had to be protected from Indians whose homes and land they had taken. The Americans concerned about both walls are equally upset and some group members may even overlap and their concern is justifiably based on moral grounds. But both need to strongly consider the enormous political economic impact of our dollars connected to building and maintaining both walls.
The proposed structure between the USA and Mexico would hamper the supply of illegal immigrant cheap labor for American businesses and professional class domestic servant seekers while offering much needed jobs to those Mexicans underserved by their nation’s political economic system. It would attempt to help regulate traffic between the nations and see to it that none were allowed in who could do harm to American taxpayers and workers.
The existing wall in Israel is used to control the cheap labor of Palestinians who work for businesses in Israel but cannot do so without passing through checkpoints and authorities regulating them in their own country and making sure they aren’t people who would do harm to Israelis.
Guess which wall and which group of opponents to the wall gets more attention from media and the elected officials of our precious democracy?
Also guess which lobby has more power over Congress and the White House and is responsible for more death both in America and especially the Middle East—the NRA or the Israeli Lobby?
First correct answer gets to spend one week with the Trump family.
Second correct answer gets two weeks with the Clintons.
Frank Scott‘s political commentary and satire is online at legalienate.blogspot.com. Email: fpscott@gmail.com.
If we were so damn worried about “the kids”, we would have a universal health care system that identifies psychological infirmities early and offers continuous treatment and medication. So called “gun control” is one of the mainstays of the cultural wars that prevent any sort of national working class solidarity from developing.