Arizona Shooting - Symptom of Very Sick Society

From a Telegraph article:

“Miss Giffords and 13 others were wounded, but six people, including a nine-year-old girl and a federal judge, were shot dead as the gunman sprayed bullets from his semi-automatic Glock pistol.”

How does anyone, let alone someone as mentally unstable as Jared Loughner obviously was, get hold of a semi-automatic Glock pistol (and magazines carrying 33 bullets each) . . ?! (see my blog:America’s Gun Laws).

“Roxanne Osler, whose son had been a friend of Jared Loughner’s, said he had a bad relationship with his parents and had distanced himself from family. ‘I wish people would have taken a better notice of him and gotten him help. … He had nobody, and that’s not a nice place to be.’”

This is a situation familiar, I suspect, to most of us at some stage, or stages, in our lives. But we didn’t go out and kill anyone – others or ourselves (perhaps because we didn’t have easy access to a gun, or weren’t quite as unstable as Jared Loughner was).

The point I want to make, however, which is the main theme of my whole blog, is that “society” isn’t organised for optimal human welfare, development or happiness (or even for its long-term survival), but to facilitate its self-exploitation to the advantage of power, wealth, privilege and, of course, “talent”.

The Arizona shooting, like bankers’ bonuses, is a striking symptom of a VERY sick society. There are countless other symptoms as well, of course, but so familiar they go unnoticed most of the time.

The individual symptoms in themselves are relatively unimportant (unless you are directly affected by them), but together they have something vitally important to tell about the state of western “society” at large; namely, that it is VERY sick.

If “society” were a human body it would be riddled with cancer, in virtually every organ. It may take another generation or so to actually die, but what is that compared to a history that goes back 2500 years?

There are those who refuse to accept that western society is terminally sick, and others who see that it is, but conclude there is nothing to be done about it, other than “make the most” of the short time still left to us.

I’m working on a “magic bullet therapy” which will kill the cancer (or at least, most of it) and enable western civilisation to survive and prosper for centuries to come, but no one, so far, has shown any interest – either because they believe my diagnosis to be wrong, or my magic bullet therapy to be a hopeless dream not worth bothering with.

I shall persevere anyway – continuing to report on my blog -, although on my own I’ve no more chance of success than a lone researcher working on a cure for all forms of cancer.