I got some In’n’Out in Culver City, day before yesterday,
after a movie. I wanted to sit in the park across Venice Blvd from there and
read a book I’m slogging through. But the park hasn’t got any benches anymore.
Not a one, in a park that covers an entire block, except where a theater stands
at one end. I ended up sitting on the driest edge of the damp rim around the
fountain in front of the theater. Gotta read, and gotta eat my carryout while
it’s hot. But not one damned bench. Annoyed.
Twenty first-graders gunned down in their class rooms.
Six teachers and administrators dead trying to protect them. Two other children,
one in the first grade classroom that wasn’t entered, and a third-grader in
another wing, were second cousins I’ve never met, children of a guy my age
whose dad is my mom’s cousin. A guy who came to my dad’s funeral two years ago
at Arlington cemetery, my dad who died at a ripe age. At eighty-seven, not
seven.
The NRA’s solution to the problem of people walking around
America with semi-automatic assault rifles with 15-, 20-, 30-round clips? We
need to arm teachers. Because we need to defend our schools.
What the hell do these two things have to do with one
another?
They both demonstrate solutions that avoid dealing with
the problem.
The park has no benches, even though it is between
several restaurants, a live theater, a movie multiplex, a classic hotel and a
Trader Joes’s. Why? Because no one wants the homeless sleeping on the benches.
And removing benches, making open space in the city useless to anyone, is
cheaper than actually dealing with homelessness. And there are only so many
benches, but there are so many homeless. Maybe Culver City will get lucky and
someone will offer to buy the property to build more housing that’s too
expensive, or more shops that are the same as all the rest, and it’ll be a
two-fer: money to cover the shortfall that every city has in the post-Prop13
era, and no place to keep the homeless out of. Win-Win.
Same thing at the schools. Why deal with the 300 million
guns that are available to use any way a loonie, a drunk, an angry husband or a
divorced father or a fired employee or a bankrupted homeowner or a TeaBagger in
ObamaLand wants to? (Ask the Secret Service about that last group.) Why not
just have parents live in fear every day their kid goes to school? Why not
scare the bejeezus out of children every day as they pass through metal
detectors, wands, past armed guards with automatic weapons. Guards who, of
course, will be paid so much, trained so well, screened so extensively, that
they would never take the school hostage because their wife just left them, and
took the kids, too.
Why deal with the problem? It’s expensive, it takes time,
and it’s different. It changes things, and it means that what has been done
before, to cause the problem and to avoid the problem, is, as a matter of fact,
THE REAL PROBLEM.
My comfort in a park, or schools held hostage, are both problems
that rarely occur in other civilized nations, at least not in my travels. No
other nation makes parks that can’t be used. Nor schools that must be defended.
Except in Talibanistan (see my 1/1 post). But the NRA thinks making teachers
into soldiers and schools into cold war bunkers is the way to go.
I’m sure they’d solve my park problem by just shooting
the homeless.
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