Killing fields

This is no morning to visit Sportsball World, by the Blob's lights. If you came looking for that -- if you came looking for some light-hearted banter about how the Yankees and Red Sox play one another every week these days -- you might as well leave now. I personally don't give a damn.

See, I can't help you today. I can't put on the happy face for you, toss around witticisms like rose petals, crack frivolously about frivolous pursuits.

I can't do this because there are 20 people dead in El Paso at the hands of a white supremacist parroting many of Our Only Available President's talking points. I can't do this because there are nine people dead in Dayton, bodies strewn about an American street on a summer night as if it were Omaha Beach on D-Day. So I can't be Jolly Old St. Nick today. It would feel obscene.

Look. This is not going to be another anti-gun screed; I'm not anti-gun, as I've made abundantly clear many times.  So don't accuse me of politicizing tragedy, the way our lackey politicians and our lackey president undoubtedly will of anyone who suggests maybe it's time we at least tried to make it a smidge harder for the insane and the aggrieved to arm themselves like Army Rangers.

I'm one of those anyones. That doesn't make me anti-gun. It merely makes me sane. But I've given up trying to talk sense to the gun fetishists who think I'm the crazy one, and who have elevated the Second Amendment to religious canon.

Fine, boys and girls. And congratulations. You've got the country you always wanted.

Although good luck surviving your next trip to Walmart.

A score of people didn't yesterday in Texas, a state where packing heat is as natural as breathing. There apparently were people packing in that Walmart yesterday, according to witnesses. Yet no one took out the shooter with a couple of well-placed hero rounds, like they do in the movies. This is because real life isn't the movies.

In real life, people freeze in those situations. In real life, with chaos happening in real time, sorting out what exactly is going on is a lot harder than it is in the movies. And in Texas, where so many real people find it necessary to strap on a Glock-9 for trips to the mall ...

Well. Maybe, in all the chaos, it was hard tell who were the "good guys with guns," and who weren't.

I don't know. I only know I'm sick of it all.

I'm sick of this Slaughter of the Week culture created for us by cowed politicians and powerful special interest lobbies.

I'm sick of thoughts and prayers, not because they're inappropriate -- they're always appropriate in the wake of these tragedies -- but because the thoughts and prayers are never backed up by action. Which ultimately makes them as hollow as reeds.

I'm sick of living in a country where I'm told by the gun lobby and its bought politicians that the answer to aggrieved white men with guns -- and lately it's almost always aggrieved white men with guns, the real terrorists attacking America these days -- is to stock up on guns myself. Which of course is the whole point.

Slaughters of the Week are good for business, you see. The more slaughters there are, the more Americans are frightened into thinking buying a gun is not a discretionary purchase, but a staple. Like gas or groceries.

I'm sick of that. And I'm sick of our Demagogue in Chief telling me -- OK, not me; I'm white -- that if I am sick of it, I can just go  back where I came from.

Well. I'm not going anywhere. Or, actually, I am.

I'm going to the grocery. I'm going to the mall. I'm going to the movies, to a restaurant, to a concert, to church if I choose to do so. And I'm not going armed. The rest of you want to turn America into the wild West, have at it. I'm not playin'.

And to the American terrorists shooting up America and trying to make me think twice about going to the aforementioned places?

To hell with you. Come at me. And to hell with the lobbyists and their political toadies who've made us think twice, and who suggest we should all just buy a gun if we don't like that.

Thoughts and prayers for those of who don't, I guess. Word has it they're great at stopping bullets.