The horrifying shootings in Maine with 18 dead innocents are just the latest sign of the rise of roiling psychological anger and acts of violence in the United States, with more and more victims each year.
Before this most recent and worst case, we had seen more than 560 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, leaving more than 575 people dead and 2,325 injured. They’re up generally 50 percent to 60 percent since 2019.
This isn’t normal. It cries out for explanation.
Does anyone have any idea of something that might have happened in perhaps early 2020 that kicked off this violence, some shock in the culture that unleashed the violent side? Memories are fading fast because of a shutdown of information, a lack of responsibility, and the daily persistence of lies. What happened was the nationwide suspension of the Bill of Rights and the forced isolation and mass disruption of pandemic planning.
It was a violent response to the microbial kingdom that paid no attention to cops, bureaucrats, politicians, and media figures. But individuals and communities did pay attention, and the result was the unleashing of terrible tragedies nationwide from which we’re nowhere near recovery.
No question that lockdowns in 2020 were the turning point in violence in the United States. People have responded to the fundamental attack on freedom and human dignity—especially the deeply inhumane idea of “social distancing”—in a variety of ways.
Some have responded through depression, others through substance abuse and weight gain, and others through dropping out of work. But not everyone can maintain enough mental clarity for those responses. Organized shoplifting is common. Stores are closing because trust is gone. Still others turn to violence, against themselves and others.
How close are we toward the normalization of violence as a common feature of our daily lives? We’ve all seen the rise of crime, watched the news of extreme methods of political agitation domestically, and had our hearts broken at shocking scenes abroad of war and terrorism. That’s right here at home, too.
Sometimes, such brutality seems on the verge of enveloping the world, even with a genuine third world war.
Let me pause to say that I’m still shocked to be writing such sentences as these.
But maybe not. I’ve had a sense since those dreadful days of March 2020 that we as a country, even in the entire world, were embarking on an extremely dangerous path. Tossing out settled conventions, laws, liberties, life routines, banning public worship and freedom of association, all on such a broad scale, under the guise of public health, was something never before tried.
In a matter of days, we went from normal life to being treated like digits in someone else’s computer model. Our only role was compliance. We were told to trust our betters in the commanding heights. The media yelled at us. The tech companies tweaked their algorithms to block our protests. Government at all levels pushed the wild idea as if this was just something we do.
They called it an “all-of-government” and “all-of-society” response. That’s another way of saying totalitarian. Media voices condemned those who wanted “freedumb.” The nation’s top infectious disease doctor said we would just have to put our rights and liberties on hold.
People subjected to lockdown inevitably took on the symptoms of PTSD. The learning losses for the kids are on a level that we’ve never seen. Every metric shows declining health, substance abuse, suicide, family breakup, and trauma from people’s family members forced into isolation and dying alone.
Among the most remarkable turns was a complete betrayal of the people by government at all levels. It wasn’t just stupid, wasn’t just mistaken. It became malicious, even sadistic, as impositions migrated from stay-at-home orders to closures to masks to shots, each one different but no less coercive. The message was: Government doesn’t care about your dignity. The media is nothing but a megaphone for elites.
These were the foreshadowing events. Violence was valorized by all official sources. That ethos gets broadcasted out to the public.
We have nowhere near come to terms with what happened. At the time, I was shocked at the silence and lack of opposition from left, right, center, or any area of society apart from just a few voices that couldn’t find each other. I had expected this grim era to be followed by a mass mea maxima culpa from all those who were silent.
It’s been the opposite. No one will even admit to having played a role in causing the wreckage. Not one person claims responsibility. That’s extremely dangerous because it sends the message to an entire people: No one is sorry, and no one really cares.
Very soon after the Maine shootings by a “trained firearms instructor in the Army Reserve,” the FBI showed up. You can guess what happened next: a lockdown, complete with shelter-in-place orders. The population gets terrorized once by a certifiably insane gunman, then again by a certifiably insane government. And the incident will be used like always to disarm the population and thus make the people even more vulnerable to acts of violence from all sources.
Lockdowns are now considered normal public policy. They no longer surprise us. This isn’t a solution. It makes it all worse.
It’s a cycle of violence, kicked off by drug addiction, cultural collapse, evil policies, and chaotic times when vast numbers of people have lost hope in the future. The problems are now extremely deep-rooted, and there’s a maddening lack of honesty about any of it.
We must come to terms before the bloodshed escalates further and further. Right now, the hopelessness that feeds the anger that leads to more violence is our destiny.
