Those angry loner white boys with guns, this time in
And those with eyes to see are reminded that the American culture is ill.
But what of the mass shootings in
You might think these are "mass shootings" too, but, in political/media terms, they're not treated as such. The victims, and in all likelihood the shooters, are black. And Democratic politicians find no political advantage in weaponizing the victims of everyday street violence in a Democratic town.
Nice try, but she failed, and she was immediately condemned. Chicago Mayor
Babies shot in
They're largely forgotten. In political terms it's all about those white boys with their guns.
The white boys are indeed domestic terrorists, some white supremacists, like the one charged with slaughtering innocents in
And while politicians of both parties argue endlessly about how many devils can fit on the edge of a knife, America knows there are more of them out there, waiting to pop.
Years ago, before Trump was elected president, there were white boys with guns too, slaughtering innocents. And those of us who made the culture argument back then, rather than advocate ripping the Second Amendment out of the Bill of Rights, were denounced, predictably, as know-nothing conservatives.
There had already been tens of millions of legal abortions serving as grim building blocks of an American death cult. And there were increasingly violent video games that fed the isolation, growing nihilism and misogyny in those sad, angry, mentally disturbed boys who nonetheless pass their background checks, buy their guns and make the news.
Now? They are lost in public schools that teach them about their toxic masculinity, they are loners, they are armed, in a culture that turns its face away from G od.
But Trump is president now, and his constantly belligerent rhetoric, used to wage war against the corrupt status quo, has given the left great license to conflate complicated issues. They see opportunity and power to be had, and before the victims from
Democratic presidential candidate
Because it was also a crazy white madman who stalked those Republican Congressmen as they played baseball in a park in 2017 and tried to massacre them all with a rifle. He was a Sanders supporter and the cry went up wherever we talk politics, in the common square and in newsrooms, that blaming the left for the insane actions of an insane man would be unthinkable.
The shooter in
In other, saner times, leveraging the political persuasions of absolute madmen against a political opponent would be a signal for a gentleman to rise from the table and leave the room without comment. But now it is the blood of our politics.
Yet whenever I feel that our politics and culture are beyond redemption, someone comes along to prove me wrong, like
"I want to look out to the families that were lost and families that lost their children," he said in
But the focus is not on them. And unfortunately, it is not on the moral courage of Pfc. Oakley.
Those who can be used in death will be used. And that who cannot be used will be stepped over. Politics doesn't focus on moral virtue. Politics focuses on power.
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John Kass is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune who also hosts a radio show on WLS-AM.