America will suffer pain again and again as long as she chooses to willfully ignore the impact of white supremacy and the easy access to arsenals and ammunition.
A plethora of reasons and excuses ranging from the vacuously inane to the morbidly insane have been proffered for the school killings that have become an all too common part of the American news cycle.
In the wake of the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, President Joe Biden said: “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”
The correct question that the American people should ask is: “When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?”
American abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass proclaimed, “It’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.”
Countless grieving parents and even America’s overcrowded prison system would likely give a hearty “Amen” to such a sentiment.
In the absence of building strong children there are far too many young men being referred to as lost boys mass killings especially in schools are all too commonplace, and often carried out by demented and angry young men.
Point of note is the fact that the 10 innocent individuals of the Buffalo supermarket rampage, were victims of an 18-year-old gunman spurred by a frenzy of white supremacist hatred, and enabled by a tidal wave of firearms falling into wrong hands. The suspect Payton Gendron had spent months before the massacre stockpiling ammunition and compiling a racist screed with references to the “Great Replacement.”
Let us all gather our collective breath, and reconnect to the fact that this theory is not new, at least not to the American government.
The “Great Replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory refers to a nefarious plot to undermine and outnumber white Americans. The term itself originates from a 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement authored by French White nationalist Renaud Camus. Its origins are obvious in the American Immigration Act of 1924 also called the Johnson-Reed Act was a United States federal law that prevented immigration from Asia in order to favor immigrants from northern and Western Europe and set quotas on the number of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, in an effort to preserve the homogeneity of the nation.
This same replacement theory inspired the deadly August 12, 2017, “ Unite The Right” rally in West Virginia, when James Alex Fields, Jr. deliberately drove his car into a crowd of people peacefully protesting, killing one person and injuring 35 others.
The 20-year-old Fields had previously espoused neo-Nazi and white supremacist beliefs
It was also the underlying motivation for the anti-semitic terrorist attack at Tree of Life synagogue —L’Simcha Congregation synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 that killed 11 worshippers.
The perpetrator 46-year-old Robert Gregory Bowers killed 11 people and wounded six, including several Holocaust survivors. It was the deadliest attack ever on the Jewish community in the United States. It was explicitly referenced by 20-year-old Patrick Crusius the gunman who killed 23 people and injured 23 others at a Walmart Supercenter on the eastside of El Paso on August 3, 2019 in the deadliest attack on Latinos in modern American history.
As deadly as this toxic conspiracy theory has been in recent years, it is America’s sinfully lax gun policies that lend it the power of mass destruction.
My heart and deepest sympathies are with the families who have lost loved ones to another senseless act of racial violence. However, my anger rages with the white supremacists who are the perpetrators of this violence, and the social media companies and gun merchants who have aided and abetted them and other extremists for profit and with the politicians who have recklessly encouraged them for votes.
Now in the wake of yet another senseless mass killing of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in Uvalde , Texas our commitment should be renewed and fortified. Not only must something be done but one that will have lasting, long-term effects.
Let us begin by calling on the President of the United States Joe Biden to hold a national summit on hate crimes, with the intent of elevating national consciousness around the rising danger of white supremacy and online extremism.
We need a whole-of-nation approach and thought fixation to combat and eliminate this threat to American national security and the stability of democracy. Until this is done innocent people will continue to pay the deadly price. The Fun is Done– Put Away the Gun.
Aleuta— The struggle continues.
