This is who we are

The mass shootings of the last several days have really caused a lot of us to reflect on where we are as a society and what must surely be coming next.

One thing is clear:  we don't have to wonder why these shootings happened.

In Buffalo, the young assailant made it abundantly clear that he wanted to kill as many black people as possible when he killed ten at the Tops supermarket.

In Southern California, a man of Chinese descent carried out his plan to shoot and kill as many Taiwanese church members as he could, because he hated them so much.

In the Dallas area, a black man with delusions about Asian-Americans opened fire in a salon in Dallas' Koreatown and injured several employees.  The man was driving a van that fit the description of drive-by shootings at two other Asian-owned businesses in the area, but no injuries were reported in either of those drive-by incidents.

The saddest part of all of this is that these people were all motivated by deeply held beliefs about non-white ethnic groups, and all appear to have been known to others to harbor these beliefs.  The Buffalo shooter posted a manifesto online that went on nearly 200 pages.

That's the biggest difference.  In our current "look at me" social media-driven world, assailants telegraph what they may be about to do (or post video WHILE they do it) for all to see.

The Buffalo shooter appears to have completely bought the "white replacement theory" that powerful forces are working behind the scenes to ensure that white people will rapidly become the minority, and will be replaced in the electorate by immigrants who will vote more readily for Democratic candidates.  Because, in the narrative so many radicalized people have come to believe, there's always someone else to blame for our lot in life.

To make things worse, various media figures and politicians also openly espouse this idiocy on a consistent basis.  Naming them only elevates them, so I will not do so here.  They know who they are, and if you're paying attention, so do you.

What can we do?  That's really difficult to pinpoint.  Gun control measures at the federal level will likely never happen because of deep divisions between Democrats and Republicans on what constitutes a fair set of regulations.  We all know that our social media environment contains enough toxicity to foment this nonsense indefinitely.  And both the gun lobby and the social media lobbyists contribute enough to various members of government to ensure that nothing will happen to either.

I mean, we just had a primary election in Kentucky yesterday, and there were people running for seats in the state legislature who were running against mandates and overreach by our Governor in the worst periods of the coronavirus pandemic.  Still, some two years later.  A candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania won his state's Republican primary, and his platform was to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election.  And still is.

We are a nation of individuals who belong to groups, whether they be of ethnic, religious, idealogical, political, gender or sexual orientation.  Each individual is important, to be sure, but so are the groups of which they are part.

The only way we become the UNITED States of America is for that to be acknowledged not just by the enlightened, but by the majority.  As our Constitution guarantees.  As it should be.