The Parkland Shooting and October 1917

Seventeen children died in Florida today, victims of a depraved gunman. Seventeen children died in Florida today, victims of a depraved society.

We live in the wealthiest and most productive nation in the history of the world. We live in a nation that, in the last fifteen years, has produced a tool, a tool we call the modern Internet, that connects the entire world, that brings every idea and every person’s innermost thoughts to anyone who wants to learn.

By any rights, we should be living in a Golden Age. But that is not what we have.

We live in a country that lacks for nothing and yet we cannot provide the political will to provide healthcare and housing to all, and so, every day people die for lack of money.

We live in a country so fundamentally ordered toward the distribution of wealth from the laborers and creators of wealth to a tiny class of financiers, landlords and plutocrats that we are now considering replacing our food stamps program with cardboard boxes of nutritionally-subpar processed food.

We live in a country where every day, hundreds of people suffer early deaths by opiates, deaths of despair in a society where millions are impoverished, hopeless, and have no reason to believe that their lives could be more than what comes out of a heroin needle. And we exacerbate the problem every day, as hospitals beholden to billionaire pharmaceutical barons push addictive painkillers that send people down the road to death by overdose.

And as was made clear today, we live in a country that suffers a public massacre every other day, a country where children in schools are murdered in their classrooms. And as the cavalcade of empty “thoughts and prayers” from Republicans and useless centrists springs forth, just as it does every time, we seem ready to once again numbly ignore this bloodbath, like we did the other seventeen mass shootings thus far this year. We live in a country where thousands are killed in gun violence every year, and we can’t even muster the political will to impose background checks on gun buyers.

In a society as developed as ours, any one of those four sins would be sign of a society in disrepair. With the four combined, we see a society that, if we are brutally, painfully honest with ourselves, is in the last stages of terminal decline. We live in a country so fundamentally run in the interests of a powerful few, a country so at odds with the interests of all but the few million who benefit from our total surrender to the powerful, a country so bereft of moral conviction and character that it refuses to fight its illnesses, that we are faced with a final decision.

We can act right now, right now, right now, to seize from the rich the rudder of our dying nation and implement a new social order that works in the interest of all, that delivers the broad, universal prosperity and happiness that we all deserve. Or we can continue to enrich Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Charles Koch and Sheldon Adelson and Donald Trump, and continue to exploit the teachers working themselves to the bone, and the low-wage workers paid so little that they can’t sustain and house themselves, and the immigrants picking our food, and the people of the developing world that provide our resources, our clothes, our fancy electronic toys, and all those who lose out in our current parasite capitalism, and allow America to end, the Dream to die, and our lives to collapse.

Socialism now, or barbarism forever.