The Culture of Vengeance

Since the Santa Fe school shooting conservatives have been offering various crackpot causes for the violence. One guy says that religion is missing from the schools. Another says it's video games. Another says it's abortion.

Huh? High school boys never give abortion a first thought.

Ollie North, the new NRA bigmouth, says it's the "culture of violence." For once he's hit the nail on the head: the NRA's gun culture promotes everyone walking around armed, ready to shoot anyone that scares them. Or crosses them. For them the solution to every problem is a gun.

The real problem is that easy access to guns allows petty grievances to turn into mass murder.

But the exact motivations behind mass shootings are not all the same. The Santa Fe shooter was apparently a rejected suitor. Others have been motivated by racism, bullying or the thrill of notoriety.

What most shooters have in common is a mindset: they have been unjustly denied their due -- sex, attention, respect, an all-white society, an Islamic caliphate. They want to avenge their perceived suffering on innocent people.

Most are suicidal, expecting to commit suicide by cop or their own hand. They are whiny little bitches who know they're whiny little bitches and want to end it all in a blaze of glory, taking as many others out with them as they can.

It's this culture of vengeance that's the problem. With Donald Trump's election the idea that you have to hit back 10 times harder for every slight has gained cultural dominance.

Combined with the conservative rejection of common courtesy and empathy (which they call "political correctness") everyone is hurling the most vicious insults left and right. This results in an explosion of perceived slights, all of which must be retaliated against tenfold.

Then mix in the Southern "code of honor" (honor demands retribution), libertarian self-absorption promoted by Ayn Rand fans and the corrosive influence of social media. The pettiest insults can quickly escalate to deadly violence.

Jesus preached that we should turn the other cheek. Perhaps this is what people who say we need religion in the schools mean. But Christ's pacifist ideology is not limited to Christianity -- it is the cornerstone of Buddhism and secular liberal philosophy. You don't need religion to realize the Golden Rule is essential for a functioning society.

The fact is that American conservatives are the ones who most vehemently reject Christian humility and compassion (for proof, see Donald Trump and his cronies).

With nonstop demonization and dehumanization of political opponents and the less fortunate, their presumed white superiority, their thin-skinned lust for vengeance, and their non-stop promotion of violence through their pagan deification of firearms, it is American conservatives that have brought this epidemic of mass murder upon us.