Thoughts and prayers? Hooey!

I’ve watched a fair amount of horrific, gut-wrenching news over the last few days, and have taken in about as much of the “thoughts and prayers” and “now is not the time to talk about policy” as I can tolerate. Talk about Groundhog Day.

What has struck me from the coverage, though, is the response from the students at that Florida high school. The kids who hid in classroom closets while they heard gunfire. The kids who pushed desks and chairs up against their classroom doors and texted updates (and farewells) to their parents. The kids who, when they left their classrooms, filed out past the bloody bodies of their classmates and teachers.

The kids I saw interviewed – 14 year olds, 15 year old, 16 year olds, 17 year olds – were, while obviously upset by what happened, uniformly poised, articulate, and sensible. And – at least the ones I saw (and, yes, they were for the most part being interviewed on MSNBC) – were not looking for thoughts and prayers, the mindless platitudes. They weren’t putting up with any mealy-mouthed “not the right time” BS. They want things to change. They don’t get why the so-called grownups don’t get off their asses and do something.

As The Onion observes every time there’s a mass shooting here:

‘No Way to Prevent This’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

‘Regularly’? They ain’t kidding.

Since the Sandy Hook Massacre in December 2012, there have been more than 430 people shot in schools. Since January of this year, there’ve been 18 school shootings.

Remember when we used to have fire drills in schools? Today’s kids have active shooter drills.

Yet we can’t seem to get any traction on background checks. On not allowing those with mental health problems to buy assault rifles. Or banning bump stocks that turn semi-automatic guns into fully-automatic guns. Even though the majority of people support these minimal efforts at doing something about what has turned into what seemingly is the one proof-positive of American exceptionalism.

Back to those kids back in Parkland, Florida. They’re calling BS. They’re just saying no to there’s nothing can be done, to now is not the time.

No, we’re never going to get rid of gun violence entirely. And we’re never going to be able to point to the massacres that never happened because of background checks, etc.

But jeez Louise.

I watched as many cowboy shows as any other all-American kid, all those idiotic shoot ‘em ups, in which our heroes ended up being “winged”, or with casually brushed aside “just a flesh wound”. Bad guys lying in the parched and dusty streets of Laredo, tumbleweed tumbling over their corpses. Bad guys? So what! They got what they had coming to them. So is it our Western mythology that’s at the heart of our gun obsession? Is the gun the last refuge of the “man’s man”, the one possession – other than a Dodge Ram – that the feminazis haven’t stripped from the hands of the now-emasculated male population? What the f is it???

The kids from Florida sound mad as hell, and they sound like they’re not going to take it anymore.

(From what I hear, they were especially savage on their home-away-from-home, social media, after Trump gave his variant on the “thoughts and prayers speech”, during which he pinned the problem on mental health issues and implicitly blamed Nikolas Cruz’ fellow students for not reporting him for his hostility and weirdness.)

Bravo to these kids. Out of the mouths of intelligent, heartfelt, savvy young people who see bullshit for just what it is.

Because the folks in Parkland Florida are going to need more than thoughts, prayers, and a blow-in from the Blowhard-in-Chief - which is apparently being scheduled because he’s going to be nearby golfing at Mar-a-Lago and really can’t afford the optics of not delivering thoughts and prayers in person – I threw in a few bucks on the GoFundMe page to benefit the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

And then I went over to Everytown.org and threw in an equivalent amount to support their efforts. Everytown is an organization dedicated to working to end gun violence, the anti-NRA, as it were. 

We’re past the time for thoughts and prayers.