They aren't sick, we are sick

By Jim Powers
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As gun violence continues to escalate in the U.S., politicians are again making a lot of noise about the gun problem in this country. Unfortunately, it’s only a magic trick, slight of hand. Most politicians, on the left or the right, have no interest in guns, or abortion, or transgender rights. Or anything else, for that matter. They don’t want to solve social problems. They want to amplify them, use them as a distraction to gain power and control.

It is not the guns that are sick, it is society that is sick. The members of a healthy society do not use guns to settle their differences. The idea that the solution to gun violence is to remove the gun is misguided at best. Just because you have a toddler in the house doesn’t mean you should throw out all your knives and scissors. At worse it is another tactic to deflect attention from our rush toward fascism. Our present national psychosis threatens our freedom.

Over the last 20 years our society has changed dramatically. I’m 72, and over most of my life the direction society moved was mostly progressive. The rights of individuals and groups were expanded, moving toward racial equality, gender equality, and tolerance for those with different beliefs and lifestyles. Toward letting ourselves and others live as we choose, without the heavy hand of government dictating what we believed, who we loved, how we identified. If your choices don’t directly affect me, live however you please.

Presently, however, our government, state and federal, have engaged in building a wall of laws around us, reaching into our personal lives in ways that are unprecedented in our history. While many claim to want less government, they claim selectively. They really want laws to constrain others, not themselves. But every one of these laws we nod approvingly at lay another brick in wall of the prison that will eventually enslave us.

How do you enslave a people? Incrementally, within the noise of social conflict. Convince the people that class and racial conflict are out of control, convince the people that that those not like themselves are evil and must be marginalized, even destroyed at any cost. Convince the people that crime is the worst it has ever been (it’s the lowest in the last 50 years) and that only by restricting their rights can the government fix the problem. Provoke people to hate and distrust each other and all our institutions.

All the social issues that have been amplified over the last 10 years are the distraction that allows those in power to become more powerful.

Leave people alone to live their lives and live your own life the way you want. LGBT, those seeking abortions, those of different races and genders and religions are no threat to you personally. But the government that is passing laws seeking to punish these people are a grave threat to you personally, because if they succeed in destroying them with laws, they will eventually come after you.

Ignore the noise, look at the real threat.

Jim Powers writes opinion pieces. His views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication