America is an exceptional country. The root of "exceptional" is "except". For example: in no nation on Earth EXCEPT the United States can a mentally ill person buy an automatic handgun with an extended clip without breaking a single law.
Here's another: in no nation on Earth EXCEPT the United States would society blame the freedom of speech for massacres committed with legally purchased guns.
The massacre in Tucson drew forth the inevitable platitudes, the appropriately somber faces, the childish gestures masquerading as introspection. The general lesson learned by the people in power has been that we should be more polite to each other.
A mentally ill manchild shoots 20 people in 30 seconds with a legally purchased gun, and the response of our "leaders" is that if only cable news hosts weren't so animated, this might not have happened.
The idea that words cause gun massacres is one of the most profound abdications of common sense I have ever witnessed. The most passing and glancing knowledge of human nature, which most people attain by the age of 12, tells us that occasional and sometimes violent disagreements are the price of admission to the human species.
People fight. People get drunk. People make bad decisions. It takes 1 second to pull a trigger. I takes a trillion years to atone for that.
Any honest person will think of the moment they've been the most angry. That one point in your life (or maybe there have been several) when you were just ready to KILL a motherfucker. Think of that moment. And then think where your life would be right now if you had been holding a gun in that moment.
And you don't have to be a bad person to have had that thought; it's simply human nature. We all get there from time to time.
Sometimes, the words of others can stir these violent and vengeful feelings. But in no other nation EXCEPT the United States can an angry man safely and surely secure a gun.
Our problem in this nation is not that we are free to say inflammatory things on television. Our problem is that we insist that our constitutionally-given freedom to bear arms is as sacrosanct as our God-given freedom of speech. And that is simply psychotic.
Speech is impossible to regulate, and only a human-hating and God-hating tyrant would even attempt to do so. Guns, on the other hand, are made by people. As such, people can regulate them. And all people do. EXCEPT Americans.
Americans, apparently, would rather blame God for their own sins. They won't blame their guns. So they blame their tongues.
I work the dream. I work in an "integrated school", an institution which was at the core of the Civil Rights movement. The sad truth, however, is that when integration was forced upon America, whites fled for the suburbs.
"White Flight" is the crude anthropological term for this phenomenon. The end result is that schools are still segregated, by fact rather than law, de facto rather than de jure. But the truly fascinating thing for me to witness is the dominance of the N word in schools that are less than 5% white.
I hear the N word at least 100 times per day at school. Not 2, not 30, at LEAST 100. Every day. This word NEVER escapes the lips of a white person. There are very few white people in the school, and most of them are teachers.
The N word is the most common verbal currency in my school. It is simply how the huge majority of students refer to each other. They don't call each other by their names; everyone is simply "nigga".
And it's a flexible word. It means friend, enemy, stranger, and everything else. It is used by all types of students. Including the handful of white ones. I went through the looking glass of race this week when I first heard a white student refer to a black student as nigga in a conversation with him.
They were discussing the particulars of a fight that had occurred earlier in the day. and Lo, the white boy said to the black boy, "nigga, you're crazy". And there was no pause, no drama, no reaction, nothing. The pointless conversation simply continued.
It occurred to me that this was either very good news or very bad news. The most charitable explanation would be that our society is so non-racist, indeed so post-racial, that the ugliest slur of racism is used casually as an ironic dispersion of our hateful ancestors.
But the less charitable explanation, which I fear is closer to the truth, is that the inextricable tentacles of hatred and self-hatred that are wrapped up in the N word have simply expanded to other races.
The good news is that the N word is no longer uttered by white men to black men. The bad news is that it is instead used casually by an multi-ethnic underclass that is as large a disgrace to King's dream as the original sin of this nation.
Sometimes it takes a 9 year old to make profound observations. While teaching Roman numerals to a group of 4th graders last month, we made a great discovery: the Romans didn't have much of an imagination.
While we were going through the ascending numerals, we ran into a wall. I, V, X, L, C, D, M.....and there it ends. So when a child asked me, "Mister, whats the Roman numeral for a million?" I realized that there was none. The Romans lived in a world of limits.
Being a huge nerd, I was much more excited about this discovery than the children, but it got me to thinking about worldviews. The Romans were the most advanced (which is not to say they weren't also barbaric) and forward-looking culture the world had seen.
They built, they conquered, they destroyed over unheard-of distances. They amassed unheard-of amounts of wealth, wrote countless words and documents, killed untold numbers of people, and dragged the world out of ancient times. The Roman eagle atop American flagpoles testifies to their lasting impact.
But they could not imagine a number over a thousand. There was no million. As big and as rich as their empire was, there was no concept of a million miles or a millionaire. As relatively advanced as they were in math, science, and history, there was no concept of a million tons or a million years.
M was the limit. Everything, absolutely everything, could be expressed in numbers no greater than one or two thousand. Even to write 10,000 in Roman numerals would be the clumsy and inelegant MMMMMMMMMM. If such a concept as a million existed, it would require writing M one thousand times.
It is one of the many ironies of history that civilization advanced as far as it did within such a limited and circumscribed worldview. Even a great empire, a great builder, a great killer of prophets, and a great shaper of modernity had its limits. And the limit was surprisingly low.
America is an exceptional country. The root of "exceptional" is "except". For example: in no nation on Earth EXCEPT the United States can a mentally ill person buy an automatic handgun with an extended clip without breaking a single law.
