Grow up or shut up

Blurted this out of my own key-actuated bullhorn sometime during the Obama administration, and never posted it AFAICR. Why would I have? It’s kind of mean-spirited.

Now, as I find myself angrily clamoring my way through the Age of Trumpidity and a plague that much of my country would like to wish away, I realize that I often contribute to public discourse more fuel than fire retardant.

I’ve become what I warned against below.

Fair notice: if I weren’t feeling cranky today, you never would have seen this. Feel free to add any comments you please. I’ll make an effort, but I don’t promise to hold onto my party manners. Nor am I planning to spend time editing this into gentle reason.

And whatever you do, please don’t bother to point out that I’m exactly who I’m talking about here. You don’t get to claim, as your own, an insight that you just read several times.

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If you used the death of a stranger to make a political point before the bodies were cold, you weren’t respecting their memory. You were pissing on it.

Who are you to decide, in the heat of a moment in which you weren’t even involved, that you’re somehow appointed to render judgment before any reasonable quotient of the facts is known? For 150 years, United States cavalry sergeants have drilled this maxim into their scouts, a fact which should be blindingly obvious to everyone over the age of 11 but seems opaque to most “journalists” and all Facebook heroes: the first report is always wrong. If you blasted out your conclusions before the facts were in, don’t be surprised when people point and laugh and tell you you’re a jackass.

But you will be surprised, won’t you? And a little offended. The jackass doesn’t know he’s a jackass. He just keeps braying. He thinks it’s a goddamn aria.

If you picked and chose convenient factoids to support a simple-minded argument, you’re not cutting through the bullshit with elegant pith. You’re distorting the facts. You could look deeper, of course, but that might require more than 20 minutes of concentrated rigor and in that time, someone else will have responded before you and first is best, right?

Sure it is — if you’re a firefighter.

The rest of us might pause to consider that educated, professional experts have already been considering policy formulations regarding education, firearms access, and mental health care for decades. They don’t just own keyboards. They have doctoral degrees and years of study and field experience. Whenever there’s a catastrophe, good-hearted Americans from coast to coast rally to see what we can do to help — but all too many of us decide that our best efforts should be directed toward adding two capitalized lines of anguished, misspelled wisdom.

We want to solve the problem. We want to be taken seriously. Ignobly, we also immerse ourselves in self-adulatory fantasies of what we might do in a similar situation or worse (much worse) armchair quarterbacking the victims.

Better mental health care would preclude atrocities. Stricter gun control would disarm the loonies. If the dead teacher who formed a human shield for her students would just have pumped a double-stack magazine into the guy…

Simple answers for simple minds.

Our age of vibrant communication and information saturation should have taught us by now to wait for solid information; to corroborate, cross-correlate, and seek expert knowledge. But it’s so much quicker to pull down a block quote from Wikipedia, lash up a false dichotomy that gets your snark on, and paste your clever meme across the server bands. In a market where most information is bountiful and free of charge, we fail repeatedly to grasp the obvious: you may not get what you pay for, but you sure as hell won’t get more.

Summarizing complexities into a single, ringing phrase doesn’t make you the “winner.” It devalues the conversation, because it only polarizes the sides. Congratulations. You’re now pursuing Pres. Bush’s black and white worldview, summarized as “we’re the good guys and you suck.” No feet of clay for your idols, and no unexpected streaks of grace allowed in the grubby-souled opposition.

They’re your neighbors, you know. You can’t just secede, or go buy an island. You have to learn to live with people you think are wrong… even if you’ve never been wrong a day in your own perfectly rational life.

“The United States has a gun problem.” Let’s start there. It’s objectively true that if anyone — anyone at all — is killed by firearms in our country, then we have a gun problem. Set your diehard Second Amendment reactions aside for a moment and realize that this statement is no more charged than saying that the United States has a rat problem — if anybody has rats in their attic, well, that’s a problem.

What’s the nature of our gun problem? Too many guns out there?

Almost certainly due to an ethos predating even the Second Amendment, we have more guns in private hands than any other country: around 88 firearms per 100 people that we know of. Given private sales, quiet inheritances and gifts, this number is almost certainly low.

And yet, for all the legitimate anguish surrounding school shootings and political assassination attempts — for all the hysterical rush to buy more guns from shops subimposing pictures of Pres. Obama under the legend “SALESMAN OF THE YEAR” — we currently have the lowest rates of gun violence in 32 years.

Too many guns out there? Or too little context? One thing’s for damned sure, whoever said “an armed society is a polite society” was an inept futurist.

Some of us are confident that we can add context in a way that’s been missing for all too long. This is their battle cry: “It’s time to have an intelligent conversation about [gun control/education/mental health/my pet axe to grind/my new pet issue].”

My G-D, the arrogance. Can you seriously presume that no one ever showed any intelligence on the subject until you showed up, fresh-faced, pissed off, and suddenly ready to engage? People were having intelligent conversations in ancient Greece. Get over yourself and your place in history. We all love ya, but you’re not the personal lord and savior of public policy.

Others of us are persuaded that our personal prowess as pistoleros and riflemen is going to save the day when the balloon goes up, the mugger approaches, the ATF comes in black heloes, or zombies attack.

Or when a school shooter shows up, and you and your portly posse pals come lurching and wheezing to the rescue, armed to the earlobes with 58-round magazines and $600 tanto knives with solid-state GPS skull crusher pommels.

Here’s good news for you, Hero: the balloon has already been up for your entire adult life. Maybe you were too busy fantasizing your way through Halo 16 to notice, but there have been a few wars on — some of which you’ve probably even heard about. Git on with your bad self and go sign up. It’s good cardio!

Maybe you’ll get lucky and draw a mission in Somalia, like the army Rangers. Or Fallujah, with the Marines. Or the hills of Afghanistan, as an Air Force JTAC accompanying a SEAL detachment. Or with a Civil Affairs team in Kosovo. Think of the possibilities to be a real live badass!

Maybe then, you’ll have something to talk about out of your own experience, and you can quit piggybacking your fantasy life on other people’s grief.

And the world goes on, and nothing was ever solved by two loudmouths wrangling in a coffee shop, or an impassioned demand that everyone prove their loyalty to you by reposting your Facebook meme. The world goes on, in all its complicated glory and perennial dirty shame. Thank whatever gods you worship that you’re not running it from the safety of your keyboard.

G-D knows, we all do.