The people who are calling for Congress to pass legislation to ban a certain model of rifle are just feeding this tragedy to the corrupt political system. And that's not the right thing to do with this, and it's not their place to anyways.
Then you've got the #NationalSchoolWalkout, which is being organized by professional feminists and women's movement activists, not students, and they have no idea what they're doing.
Putting pressure on large, powerful things that are ruthlessly capable and dangerously complicated is probably a risky move. You want to be very sure you have any idea what you're doing. And the U.S. federal government is a very LPTTIRC&DC.
What's more pathetic than an obviously very uninformed, and staggeringly naive individual acting as if they are an expert social engineer? A whole country full of them acting this way while parents are burying their children.
"But we have to do something about this! So you're saying we should just do nothing at all? Children are dying! What's your solution?"
Stop screaming.
I can hear you loud and clear. And I’m very impressed with you for clarifying to everybody that you're against school shootings this week. You're a really great human being. Good job.
What do you mean by solution? Find a way to make evil and malevolence completely disappear from the universe?
Can't.
But of course that's what we aim for anyway. And by striving for an ideal world, we can make the world a little more like heaven and a little less like hell.
And if that's the best we can do, why not? I think the most we can do is try as individuals to sort our own problems out and give up our vices and strive to embody our highest potential. To practice more love and kindness and honesty within and for ourselves, then within and for our families, then within and for the people we see every day and every week.
And for some reason that's the kind of thing you seldom hear politicians say. And it's not nothing or trivial, or naively idealistic, or overly vague. It's everything. Who knows the number of individual personal failures of love and honesty and kindness– maybe going back for generations of people– that added up to what this boy did?
That's why I think "thoughts and prayers" is not laughably useless like so many Democrats and liberals have portrayed it. (They better think a little more carefully about what they're doing. Some of the victims' families are praying right now.) It is actually the most important response to a tragedy like this.
If we spend some time in our thoughts feeling the tragedy and senselessness of what happened, and resolve through "prayer" (orienting ourselves toward the ideal– the highest, most absolute, and most universal good) to do better with whatever each of us is individually responsible for– if everybody made a sustained and committed effort to do that, to beautify and ennoble their own lives, there's just no telling how good we can make life on this planet.
Politicians are always promising you the whole world and breaking their promises. And when they make their promises, they never tell you what it's going to cost you. It's the way of charlatans and frauds, but it's an easy way to win applause and take advantage of the desperate, and how many of us are suffering and living lives of quiet desperation after all?
But what if you don't need politicians to make the world a better place? Would you take that kind of power into your own hands even if it meant taking responsibility into your hands too? Even if it meant exerting yourself, and doing the work every day, the emotional labor it takes to live more consciously, kindly, and beautifully?
Last of all, to those people who made the New York Times' headline about a "#MassShootingGeneration" a trending topic on Twitter over the weekend: You all seriously need to calm down a little bit.
There is no such thing as the "Mass Shooting Generation" If there was it would be the generation that shot each other by the millions 75 years ago. MY generation mostly smokes weed, Netflix, and chills.
