MADE FOR TV: INSURRECTION-MILITIAS(SIC)
A relatively small bunch of frustrated males loaded with guns of all sorts, are busy sublimating all kinds of inadequacies into a "masculine" fantasy involving a redux response to 18th century Tyranny: "grab a gun and save the country!" plastered on to a country of over 360,000,000 people with a solid 233 year old working Constitution.
Why a few hundred of such folk should have received the attention and publicity they are receiving in this run-up to the Election of 2020 is entirely the fault of a Media Industry which makes money off of every bizarre aberration in American Society, generating fear, conspiracy theories, and paranoia from normally reasonable people.
This out-sized attention to a threat which is minuscule in relation to the size of the United States, as well as it's large population, is being manufactured to grease the wheels of those who can profit most from generating controversy for political, corporate, and personal gain.
Sometimes, even my optimistic outlook on the future is dimmed by the realization that with the internet, television, and mass gatherings or rallies, we are living in an environment that dictators and autocrats of the past would feel right at home in. Not the technology, but the mass manipulation of available media for disseminating propaganda is what the would-be's and the once were's have in common.
But, I am always looking for a cure for the ills of Society, so, I will point, again, to a drum I have been beating with local elected officials and anybody else who would listen: Education! Education! Education! Public. Equal. Well-funded resources for Libraries, Playgrounds, Art resources, Music programs, Sports programs. Well-rounded people do not have the kinks in their psychology which allow fantasy to override knowledge of facts. And, they probably don't have so much desire or need for guns.
A healthy society doesn't need as many policemen, expensive jails, drug re-habilitation programs, mental health crisis intervention programs as a society which does not have its priorities straight.
In the United States, we have developed into a nation which does everything backwards. We put problems ahead of solutions, which ought to be the first order of business. It costs more money; it makes some people very rich.
For instance, if a young adolescent receives a good education, with well-designed sex education instruction, there is little need for drastic choices, such as abortion, or, carrying an un-wanted child to a fatherless future, unemployment, poverty, welfare, possibly crime, incarceration: rinse and repeat.
If a child has a well-stocked Library with excellent after-school programs, or a public playground with a full-time sports director, or a school or museum with arts and music programs, there is an outlet for the innate creativity which children possess, which empowers them in ways that drugs or sex or vandalizing mischief can never accomplish.
But, every year, the City budgets find law enforcement expenditures increased at the expense of those programs which would make much of them unnecessary.
So, that brings us back to the so-called militias: poor souls who think a gun and threats will "save" the country from their fantasized, non-existent threats: It's not 1776. They aren't Washington's Revolutionary Army. Their country doesn't need them to "save" its citizens.
The enablers in media and, sorry-to-say-it, elected officials who give them a voice larger than their threat, do all the good, honest, reasonable people a terrible disservice. Whenever I hear yet another reporter or interviewer speculating on whether the country will be torn apart by such small entities, I turn it all "off."
Let's get real, as the saying goes. Let's not, like the prince in Aristophanes' play, "The Frogs," go “riding off in all directions at once.”
The Republic will stand. And, citizens will hold their elected officials accountable to a new degree of intensity. With the change in demographics, you can count on it.
© Margaret Koscielny, 2020