May 26 2022 A National School Walkout Against Gun Violence By Those Who Refuse to Be Sacrificed to the Wealth and Power of Elites As the National Rifle Association Meets to Provide Political Cover For Mass Murder; How If a General Strike Joined Them?

jayofdollhousepark

May 27

A massive national school walkout today demonstrated solidarity with the victims of gun violence by their peers, who refuse to be sacrificed to the wealth and power of elites as the National Rifle Association meets on their doorstep to provide political cover for mass murder. How if we joined them in a General Strike?

America is held hostage to the gun lobby, its paymasters the merchants of death, and to the business of empire which requires an open market to keep arms manufacturers ready to supply us in vast and multiple wars of imperial dominion. This, and this alone, is why we have an epidemic of gun violence.

Why did the police refuse to rescue the children and prevent their parents from doing so? This is simple; they exist not to protect public safety, but to enforce the profits of their paymasters and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege as organizations of white supremacist terror.

Is it because they are cowards? Bullies are often cowards, because they have organized their identity around fear and the use of fear as force.

Is it because they are unequal to the mission of taking down one armed teenager with multiple trained killers or are outgunned by one rifle?

Or could it be that authority requires terror and deniable assets like this deranged teenager, who has been shaped by their lies into a monster with which to terrorize the rest of us into welcoming the centralization of power to the carceral state and its occupation force of police?

We see here true motives of those who would enslave us; profits from an open arms market in service to imperial wars of dominion and the use of white supremacist terror and gun violence in the manufacture of consent to be subjugated.

But the great secret of power is that it is hollow and fragile, can be delegitimized through exposure and disbelief in authority, and of force that it is empty and fails at the point of disobedience.

This is how we free ourselves from enslavement and subjugation by authority and its use of force; believe nothing and refuse to obey.

The Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Expose Authority, Mock Authority, and Challenge Authority. Let us challenge authority by refusing to serve it, like Charlie Chaplin battling the great machine which has caught him in its gears in his magnificent film The Factory. For without us, all systems fail.

Let us say with Nikos Kazantzakis; "I believe in nothing. I hope for nothing. I am free."

As I wrote in my post of February 16 2022 Victory For the People Over Profiteers of Gun Violence and White Supremacist Terror; We celebrate a victory for the people over profiteers of gun violence and white supremacist terror in the case of the Sandy Hook families against Remington, manufacturer of the gun that was used to murder twenty children and six adults in a few minutes. Guns are weapons of terror and mass destruction, and should be legislated as such.

As written by Sarah Jorgensen, Jason Hanna and Erica Hill at CNN; "Lenny Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah was killed in the shooting, said in the news release that their loss is "irreversible, and in that sense, this outcome is neither redemptive nor restorative."

"One moment we had this dazzling, energetic 6-year-old little boy, and the next all we had left were echoes of the past, photographs of a lost boy who will never grow older, calendars marking a horrifying new anniversary, a lonely grave, and pieces of Noah's life stored in a backpack and boxes."

"What is lost remains lost. However, the resolution does provide a measure of accountability in an industry that has thus far operated with impunity. For this, we are grateful."

As written by Sebastian Murdock in Huffpost; "Nicole Hockley, whose 6-year-old son was killed in the shooting, said she hopes the settlement will push gun companies to operate differently.

"My beautiful butterfly, Dylan, is gone because Remington prioritized its profit over my son's safety," Hockley said in a statement. "Marketing weapons of war directly to young people known to have a strong fascination with firearms is reckless and, as too many families know, deadly conduct. Using marketing to convey that a person is more powerful or more masculine by using a particular type or brand of firearm is deeply irresponsible. My hope is that by facing and finally being penalized for the impact of their work, gun companies, along with the insurance and banking industries that enable them, will be forced to make their business practices safer than they have ever been."

Hope is a fine and noble thing, final gift or curse of Pandora to humankind, a tenuous and frangible thing, ambiguous in meaning and its power to bring change, like love and faith, and like its confreres among our passions which are also Ideals perhaps not very bankable without action to make it real. The praxis of hope is struggle.

Here I must digress, for I believe the future evolution of humankind and the history of the next millennium will be defined by the struggle between two forces; the renunciation of the use of social force and violence as democracy and peace and the universalization of force and violence as tyranny and terror, and what we do with our hope in the face of hopeless imposed conditions of struggle and unanswerable force will decide our fate.

Camus interrogated this best and directly in The Myth of Sisyphus and constructed his Absurdism on his interpretation of the uses of hope in resistance to fascist tyranny, and nothing has superseded his insight.

Why is this relevant to the issue of gun violence? Because we face enormous systemic and structural forces in opposition to freeing ourselves from constant threat of death, and our choices here will shape our response.

When teaching Camus' essay and his novel The Stranger, I always directed students to his remarks in the lecture he gave to the Jesuits, "the difference between us is, you have hope."

Albert Camus used hope in a special context, for in that lecture on hope and faith Camus seizes the problem directly; hope is ambiguous, relative, a Rashomon Gate of contingency and multiplicities of meaning, and like its myth in Pandora's Box both a gift and a curse.

How is this of use to the audience Camus wrote for, the freedom fighter who resists and yields not, beyond hope of victory or survival? How do we find the will to claw our way out of the ruins of civilization and make yet another Last Stand? How answer overwhelming force and the unwinnable fight?

As Jean Genet said to me in Beirut of 1982, moments before we expected to be burned alive by Israeli soldiers who had set fire to our house after we refused to come out and surrender, "When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things." It is a principle of action by which I have lived for thirty-nine years now.

Herein lies a gate which opens not to Dante's Inferno, but to freedom and self-ownership as authenticity, and to seizure of power from authorized identities, the boundaries of the Forbidden and the tyranny of other people's ideas of virtue, marked by a sign bearing the famous warning; "Abandon hope, all you who enter here."

Always go through the Forbidden Door.

As Lenin asked; "What is to be done?"

Let us repeal the Second Amendment, disarm and demilitarize the police, end immunity from prosecution of gun manufacturers for the crimes which they enable and promote, disband the National Rifle Association as an organization of terror, break the link between arms manufacture as a business of empire and the carceral state which floods the market with cheap guns to shape some of us into monsters with which to terrorize the rest as a pretext for the imposition of a police state, and abandon the valorization and fetishization of violence as toxic masculinity, misogyny, and patriarchal terror.

This may be the work of centuries, but in a world wherein the national and imperial ambitions and whims of its nuclear powers, currently America, China, Russia, Britain, France, North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, and NATO nuclear weapons sharing partners Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey, can exterminate our species and annihilate much of our planet, can we afford not to act now to begin disarmament?

Today we have taken a first step as a nation toward freeing ourselves from the existential threat of gun violence and from patriarchal and white supremacist terror. This we justly celebrate, but let us also unite in solidarity of action to liberate ourselves and humankind from the use of social force.

As I wrote in my post of June 12 2019, Equal Access to Justice for Victims of Gun Violence Act; Those who manufacture, sell, or trade guns must be held responsible for the harm that they do, and we must support this important legislation which ends their immunity from being sued by the victims in whose suffering they are complicit. This industry of death must be pursued to its utter destruction.

As Gabrielle Giffords said, "The gun lobby convinced politicians that an entire industry deserved to operate without fear of ever being held responsible in a courtroom. Today, we stand up and fight again to restore the fundamentally American principle that no industry, including the gun industry, is above the law."

Surely a least-restrictive policy of gun ownership would say, demonstrate that we can trust you with our lives, that you have earned the right to bear arms through a history of honorable conduct and self-discipline, that you are able to make kill/no kill decisions rationally and with a judgement free of racism, rage, jealousy, vengeance, the need to dominate and control and the desire to subjugate and inflict pain and terror, or other mental illness or impairment, and unclouded by drugs or alcohol, and you are free to openly carry a weapon except in areas otherwise restricted.

Who could pass such a test? Who can be trusted to bear death among us, with de facto powers of summary execution?

Our laws must recognize that anyone with a gun is a bearer of death, and has chosen this role and brings death into all situations which they encounter and all relationships in which they participate. Possession of a gun proves intent to kill. Bringing a gun into a situation means you have upped the ante to life or death in all that you do.

Choose life.

Charlie Chaplin in The Factory