Chocolate or Vanilla

93

I’ve been a bit depressed lately. Enough so that I feel I’ve lost my voice in a way. I usually journal extensively and my photos are generally a medium for my thoughts in some metaphorical manner. But lately I’ve been uninspired because the world has been so disheartening.

It seems that the world is just in a constant spiral into self absorption, self entitlement, and failure to accept the most basic responsibility for decency. Everyone wants something, expects something, but don’t want to be put out, even the tiniest bit, to acheive what we think we deserve. We wave our arms around and accomplish little, while people doing even less stand back and criticize.

Recently we wandered through Lonsdale Quay and I stopped at the candy counter. All of the colourful confections caught my eye and made me raise my lens. But, as so often happens to me when I look through the lens, they also seemed like analogies for events or circumstances. I suppose it’s just a case of the things rattling around in the back of my mind popping to the front when some random object seems suddenly relevant in a metaphorical sense.

The candy apples with their sticky sweet outer coating, ready to suck the fillings out of some unsuspecting teeth, seemed like an analogy for the sticky discussions following every mass shooting south of the border.

The candy corn an analogy for artificial nature of the trite and useless responses to every gun related loss of innocent life.

The killings in Las Vegas seem to be just another manifestation of a festering disease that society seems to have contracted. “The world owes me everything, I owe the world nothing. I am right and everyone should see that, my opinions should be respected simply because I have them.”…and so on.

No, the world owes you nothing.

You may be wrong, and that’s ok, or at least it should be ok.

We mire ouselves in a muddy mire filled with “us and them” and seem to think that simply because we might look differently or think differently, then our differences must divide us.

How screwed up is it that people can’t see how wonderfully interesting it is to think differently? How messed up is it that people think different opinions somehow means personal invalidation? People have become so bloody sensitive to abslutely everything that we take being wrong as a personal insult instead of as an opportunity to learn something new and maybe change our position on a topic.

Life would be pretty terrible if we all thought the same, at least I think so. If we all thought the same we wouldn’t ever strive to learn new things, to expand our experiences, to better the world and our place within it. None of that would be of interest because we’d all be so pleased that we agreed on anything and there would have to be mass consensus before we advanced, even a little bit, because advancement would mean dissent. How awful would that world be!

No one has yet come up with a rationale for the killings in Las Vegas, and maybe we will never know why a man carted a large number of lethal weapons into a room high up in a hotel and took aim at a music festival filled with people wanting nothing more than to enjoy an evening filled with entertainment.

People jumped to the inital conclusion that it was a radical terrorist. But it wasn’t, it was a homegrown lunatic. There is no ISIS to blame, no terrorist cell to point at, no immigration laws to shake at the opposition.

People will rush out to buy more guns to protect themselves with, never seeing the ridiculousness of their actions. The easy access to guns is what puts them all at risk in the first place, but their idiotic and sacrosanct Second Amendment is perceived as more important than the lives of innocent people.

These are the same people that see the world in black and white, them and us, with or against.

I will never understand how the US Congress can continue to allow innocent people to die because they are unwilling to make any real changes that will save lives. They wring their hands and say that change is impossible (it isn’t), that criminals will always find guns (probably, but why make is so easy for them?), that it is wrong to infringe upon the rights of the people (Didn’t the innocent victims have a right to safety?).

Life’s not so simple or straightforward, and it makes me sad that there are people that reduce things to chocolate or vanilla. Why can’t they accept that both are equally wonderful and respect them for their unique attributes?

I can’t make heads or tails of people who think it is a right to own guns that are designed to kill people. Sure, have your hunting rifle (and keep it locked in a gun cabinet), but no one needs an AK-47 in their closet…no one.

Things are upside down when it is a God-given right (that’s laughable to me on so many levels) to have a gun designed to kill humans, but health care is a privilege.

It depresses me when I look to the south and listen to the empty platitudes, the useless “thoughts and prayers”, and bear witness to the continued inaction against something that can be fixed, if only there was the will to do so.

I wish that those who feel so attached to their guns could see themselves through the same lens that the rest of the world sees them through.

But the Vegas killings are now behind us, the dialogue has slowed, and we all wait, hoping it won’t happen but knowing it will, for the next mass shooting, sadly knowing that again nothing will change, but always hoping something will.

It’s all so depressing.

Or maybe it’s just the rain talking…..

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