There’s a kind of strange poverty in a place billed as the world’s wealthiest democracy, where mass shootings are so easy and frequent.
It’s the kind of poverty that runs a cold chill in the mind, even when goodness and opportunity is common, and running into human kindness everyday is heartfelt.
It is not a poverty that dwells in the ordinary individual American who is more likely to greet you across the fence with a smile, hold the door for you so it doesn’t bang in your face, see the human in you before they blink and see you in codes of creed and color.
The every-day American, no matter their beliefs, is a human whose default setting is a genuine kindness. I call it institutionalized kindness. You fake it until it becomes an easy shelter to run to with every human encounter. The common plastic smiles may be a meaningless movement of muscle, but they genuinely mean to say- I mean you no harm, even if I truly don’t care how you’re doing.
That is why this poverty I speak of is one that defines a collective national personae, not the individual, even if it’s the individual who acts out its chilling evil. If you understand systems-think, this one is easy to grasp.
I do not know a nation anywhere else in the world where, outside of a war zone, where it’s so easy to walk into a classroom, a church, a mall, an office, and shoot innocent kids and random strangers as if they were flies on a carcass.
The US leads in this phenomenon by huge, huge margins. It’s a bone-chilling poverty. A soul starvation whose center is moved by a trinity of guns, god and greed.
Today, 17 people were shot in Minneapolis. Children killed. At a church service. 268 mass shootings in the world’s “leading democracy”.
