I tread very carefully here, but I have been getting…how can I say this?
I have been getting interesting feedback from my conservative friends and acquaintances about what happened in Vegas.
I am not throwing anyone under the bus here (Charlottesville & Nice has loaded that saying with unnecessary imagery).
What I am driving at is that the racial identity of the shooter and the line Conservatives have drawn in the sand against further regulating assault rifles has created a paralyzingly cognitive dissonance.
The NRA and Conservative gun owners put a lot of political and ideological capital into making sure each of the increasingly horrific massacres of innocent Americans leads to less and less movement towards limitations on the rights of Americans to own guns, with as little prejudice towards the mentally ill as possible.
That’s where they placed their firepower.
But the rub here is that the worst assault rifle driven atrocity in American history, shattering the combined casualties of all the catch word massacres before it, was aimed directly at the symbol of guns, and God; that Walmart-ized hub of rural white identity, Mainstream Country Music.
Now I am not spouting false flag theories theories, or minimizing the diversity of victims. But arguably the biggest and maybe the best Country music party of the year was laid to waste by a gunman that chewed apart innocent men, women, and children, like a Gatling gun in a western wagon aimed at Natives. And that piece of sh_t shot them all in the back, aiming to stir a deadly stampede of panic.
This was no Wounded Knee, but the sheer numbers of dead and dying force us to compare such an atrocious spillage of innocent blood on American soil to the work of an entire cavalry.
To quote Heart of Darkness without a shred of irony, “The Horror, The Horror.”
But I ask myself as people speak to me honestly and open heartedly as they attempt to relate to the mind set of the shooter, how their blood would be boiling, calling upon their barbarian Gods of War they have confused with Jesus Christ, if the shooter was,
1) a Muslim of any sort of middle eastern descent i.e. Brown.
2) A Black Man of any shade from the off white of Colin Kaepernick to beautiful mahogany.
3) The instant nuclear war if it was an agent of North Korea.
I am only stating the situation and what I see on the ground.
I wonder if lone wolf will someday also read, “a disillusioned and potentially mentally unstable white mass shooter” in a future entry into the Webster Dictionary.
Everything about this situation is maddening, including how much harder a white man in America has to work compared to be people of color to be considered a terrorist.
From this cover of TIME, it appears we are going backwards:
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many musical ventures and is one of the driving forces behind the Staxx Brothers. He is planning a tour of Nigeria for 2018.
