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At some point, the reality will pierce the rhetoric or we will need to commit to the war of all against all: Lefties kill the righties. Deplorables massacre the libtards. There is no text of subtext anymore, only profits and soapbox time and a fetishistic love of violence which makes guns the best extension of a self. Everyone knows the footnotes are there to say “we are saying the same old thing” but offer soapbox time and a massive fetish of violence as the best extension of self. Dad’s feces all about. Surely we know not to take the things we hear on days like this one seriously: “Hopes and prayers,” “heartbreaking,” “will be brought to justice.” Those are just blanks shot into the air, how we “reflect” while turning away from the guilty face in the mirror. The police department in Boulder, like police departments everywhere, puts their Public Relations Rep in front of the camera. The person who can introduce (in this case) “the three officials” we will hear from starts us off.  Good people all, no doubt, but part of a system that has learned to make a protocol.  This is what you do with the media after an active shooter slaughters our fellow citizens. Do we have a PowerPoint for how to handle the American Carnage sure to come to your jurisdiction? Colorado has needed that protocol more than most: Columbine, Colorado Springs, Aurora, Denver, Boulder. If only all mass shootings happened in this one state, or just near mountains, or in the evening? Were those killed in Boulder yesterday Republicans or Democrats? Did they love Trump or hate him? Will your god send them up or down? Does any of that matter given that they lost the lottery of living in an America that loves firearms?  Especially loves those firearms that make killing as many people as efficiently possible?  Loves making these as accessible as possible too? Is it not true that America is, more than anything else now, a place that loves guns? Once a country dedicated to the preservation of inalienable rights and self-evident values, it is now a place dedicated to the preservation and promotion of guns. There was a time when America and Americans wanted to do the great and revolutionary work that serves as the cornerstone of any worthwhile future, the work of: “we.” We will have to take some shame upon ourselves. We will have to think ourselves sick. We will have to do something, anything, different than we have done in the past. We on the left cannot coddle our children with “safe spaces” that keep them free of ideas we do not like.  If we can not hash out dangerous ideas in class and the public square, if we become self-righteous about who is good and who not, we will have to expect that people will object as the silenced and the humiliated always object: with violence. We on the right cannot pretend a man who tells thousands of lies is the only one with the truth or that Antifa and BLM defecated and murdered people in The Capitol. If we cannot hold ourselves to the same principles of decency we proselytize to others we will have to expect that we, not others, cause the fraying of America’s decency. And none of us who point fingers at Red States or Blue states can forget that Silicon Valley and Wall Street work not for any party but for a corporate culture that strips dignity from Camden, New Jersey as much as from mining towns in West Virginia. How at this point, can we not try something new? When I read about Boulder I did what we all do. I thought: Who do I know there? For me it is an old, friend, a college buddy, who lost his teenage son in a tragic accident five years ago. Do I need to tell you that since the passing of his son his eyes never close without the hint of sadness? That even his smile looks muted? That he never laughs as he once did? And so today I had the terrible fantasy: what if his daughter, his only surviving child, was shopping in Boulder? What if my friend’s life, already ruined by accident, was made pointless by today’s American routine? He and his daughter are both safe, as it so happens. But more of our brothers and sisters died today. And now the sun has gone out permanently from the faces of their families too. So ten years from now, if you want, I’ll hand out the handguns to my students. I’ll write love songs to AR-15’s and give up asking gun owners to learn what Justice Burger said about the second amendment. But for the next ten years can we try selling guns and ammo to nobody at all? And see what happens? Because it is either that or what? Another day of accepting the unacceptable and defending the indefensible. Lock and load.