- It amazes me that intelligent people
will watch the news with the slack-jawed amazement of Arkansas yokels seeing
a horseless carriage; slurping down the smoothly modulated drivel like
it's gospel. The latest of our media bread and circuses involved the death
of some popular kids in a picturesque small mountain town. Gosh, is it
sweeps week already? Wait, kids wearing black committed the crime? Did
they happen to like Marilyn Manson? Whoo-Hoo! Get the camera and makeup
crews on the plane! Televise the memorial service! Someone get me theme
music. Is Elton John available?
-
- Did anyone else notice that while we
were watching the show on center stage, the magicians on the other stage
managed to slide 10 billion dollars and 33,000 ground troops towards our
non-war in the Balkans? That's billion, with a B. Remember the budget surplus?
It's gone. We're using it to fight Serbia and Iraq. Remember Iraq? It was
all the rage during the election. We're still there. Remember the Japanese
internment camps of WWII? They're building new ones all over the country.
Theoretically to hold Serbian refugees. Your tax dollars at work.
-
- Now, if this were a movie, the plot would
end there. Distracting the country with dead teenagers so you can play
soldier is quite the PR stunt. Once we have troops on the ground, it's
easy to convince the public to pull out their yellow ribbons. I mean, they've
been used so often in the last decade that people keep them in the kitchen
junk drawer, so as to have them close at hand. Once the yellow ribbons
are out, patriotism is worn like a badge; government has much more leeway
and big brother's wallet opens for new toys that go boom in the night.
It worked for Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Poor Nixon, if only he'd known
the power of the Yellow Ribbon. We might have won Vietnam if we'd used
Mattel's PR engine instead of their M16's.
-
- However, I propose that the plot is more
Machiavellian than a poorly disguised excuse to distract the public while
the military budget gets pumped again. Armed teens on a rampage is the
best of all possible situations for the gun control lobby. What's that?
The President has a new gun control policy already written and ready for
Congress? How convenient. I guess the 17 laws the rampaging teenagers broke
were not enough. Surely, if they knew they were going to break 20 laws,
the plot would have been foiled.
-
- Now, you know that I'm not a voice for
the NRA, but by the same token, I don't trust our government enough to
let them have all the guns. But all it will take to disarm Americans is
a few public incidents involving kids in this era of child idolatry. You
can hear the cry going up around the country even now, "Won't somebody
please think about the children. Sob, sniff ". Hysterical soccer moms
who forgot to teach their children right from wrong are waving tear dampened
hankies, demanding that the government fix their mistakes.
-
- So I'm paranoid am I? Seeing conspiracies
where there are none? Ah then, what are the odds that suddenly a bunch
of baby unabomber/mad gunner Trenchcoat mafias would suddenly appear everywhere
at once? Last evening, while half listening to the local news, my attention
was caught by the arrest of some local kids that school officials thought
"might be dangerous" because of clothing, reading and music habits.
There was no other evidence to suggest that these kids were dangerous.
Since it was the second story about kids getting arrested, I did a little
checking around to see just how many areas were suddenly having problems
with the black-wearing set. Since I'm basically a slacker, and didn't feel
like going through the newspaper stacks at the library, I checked via the
web. Granted, not a statistically sound sampling, but a sampling none the
less.
-
- I started at http://www.broadcast.com/television/
and went randomly down the list of news broadcasting stations where I could
see the broadcast and where there were printed archives of the stories.
I stopped after 7 stations because if I'd waded through the saccharin speech
patterns of one more bleached blonde my brain would have exploded. 5 of
the 7 stations had local stories about guns in school.
-
- WHAS-TV - ABC 11 - Louisville, KY. Death
threats at Salem Middle School Notes that threatened the lives of four
students surfaced at the school on Friday. Parents are suggesting everything
from locking down the school during the day, to metal detectors, to book
bag searches. http://www.whas11.com/redirects/news.html
-
- WABC-TV - ABC 7 - New York, NY. Student
Brings Father's Gun To Middle School Two sixth grade students at the Turn
of River Middle School in Stamford, Connecticut have been suspended after
one of the boys brought an unloaded gun to school. The other student was
suspended for allowing the gun to be stored in his locker.
-
- KENS 5 Eyewitness News - San Antonio,
TX. Teens Held in School Bomb Plot While the town of Littleton, Colorado
continues to bury its dead and deal with tragedy, closer to home things
are slowly getting back to normal in the hill country community of Wimberley.
http://www.kens-tv.com/prd1/now/template.display?p_section=100&p_who=KENS
-
- KXTV-10 - Sacramento/Stockton/Modesto,
CA. A Lodi student arrested for making a bomb threat to his school reportedly
admired Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. http://www.kxtv10.com/news/Storiesarchive/April1999/042799/lodi.html
-
- News Channel 5, WTVF - Nashville, TN.
9th Grader Arrested Tennessee isn't immune to what happened in Littleton,
Colorado. Metro Police took a 9th grader into custody today at a bus stop
in South Nashville after an officer spotted him with a little bag of gunpowder.
They charged him with possession of an explosive component. http://www.newschannel5.com/headlines/headline.htm
-
- Hmm, that seemed a little odd. So I checked
newspapers with online search engines. Again, came up with large instances
of this activity showing up all over the place in the last two weeks, usually
in smaller towns. Towns where the NRA is likely to have a large membership
base. (Note that the time frame was 2 weeks, so not all of the incidents
could be tied to or assumed to be "copycat" crimes.)
-
- So, let's think about this for a minute.
Take one weird war out of nowhere. Add thousands of refugees being brought
to the US. Mix into internment camps going up all over the country. After
all, that is why those camps are being built, right? Separate local reserve
forces from their states and send them to Europe. Move the "real"
army into now empty reserve bases. Blend in a dash of Oklahoma City, a
pinch of Waco and a cup of Columbine. Whip into frothy peaks of nationalism
and pathos. Sprinkle liberally with fear of people who are different or
"undesirable". Anyone else hear the shades of Nuremberg in that
recipe?
-
- So, here we are; facing a paternalistic
government with relocation camps and armies in our backyards. But let's
all remember; guns are the enemy. It's the loners and the people wearing
black we have to beware. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Shouldn't you be looking for your yellow ribbons anyway?
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