By Sheldon Greaves

I’m in a moment of profound wakefulness. It’s 3:30 in the morning and I cannot get the image of dead children and teachers out of my mind. I’ve been saturated by this latest obscenity and the even deeper obscenities being used to excuse it or explain away the need for tighter controls have started to emerge. The most noteworthy is the claim from the right in various guises that all this could have been prevented had there only been more guns around. The sheer idiocy of that statement speaks for itself. The flip side is that “anything can be a weapon” which ignores the fact that the killer could not have inflicted the damage he did without an assault rifle or comparable weaponry.

Other discussions have taken their predictable paths. The problem of mental health care in this country is indeed a national disgrace that began when Gov. Reagan turned out thousands of mental patients with only a handful of pills and their own resources to become the first large surge of homeless street people in decades. The larger health care debate continues, incredibly, to put profits over people.

Movies, video games, violent television, and the media all have taken their lumps, deserved or otherwise, although other far less violent countries have quite enough of those things too.

But there are other things that do not enter into this discussion, at least not in a substantive way. We talk of “gun culture” as if this bastion of carefully cultivated fear and madness is an isolated incident, but it’s not. It is a matter of “culture” but it’s not limited to guns.

There is an underlying thread to all of these ideas, but they go much further and show up in far more diversified places. Briefly put, the very idea of the social has been under attack in the United States for decades, mostly from the political right and its allies. Consider things like offshoring jobs overseas, union-busting, voter suppression or intimidation, robbing pensions, failing to prosecute or even investigate the most profligate criminals among us, eroding the very environment that keeps us alive with no legal consequences to speak of, while keeping the rest of us in an increasingly onerous security regime that treats everyone as a potential terrorist.

Think about how even the basic right of political protest and other forms of protected speech invites responses usually reserved for criminals. Incarcerating criminals is a private business, removed from the public eye and public responsibility. We send our children off to fight ill-conceived and useless wars, but cannot bring ourselves to deal effectively with the aftermath. A relentless political media vilifies and denigrates the poor and the vulnerable with a viciousness that chills the blood. And, all the while, that same conservative media howls the alarm 24/7/365 about who we must hate, who is to blame, why we are all in danger, and nearly all of it is blatantly false.

All of these things have the effect of eroding the ties that make communities function. They alienate us from each other, wrapping each of us in a cocoon of surplus evil and exploitation by those who know how to ply us with fear and falsehood.

So local workers are expendable. Sick people are too expensive, so we abandon them to die. Political capital and corporate profits flow from the blood of our service members, not to mention hundreds or thousands of non-American casualties and millions of refugees. Those we incarcerate are a source of profit; the more of them the better. The anemic job market consists of millions of people who are no longer your neighbors, but competitors in a zero-sum game where winners win big and losers are, by definition, disposable.

With the decline of the social, we are no longer accountable for what we do. A democracy will only function well if we all understand that at any moment we can be called upon to justify our beliefs and actions, and that how we rise or fall within our community is driven by the answers we give.

So is it really surprising that when the frustration and fury that attends such alienation meets the latest in modern firepower, the result is tragic? They are not people on the far side of the gunsight, they are moochers and competitors and “elites” and gay people or “baby killers” or whatever category of people the shooter has been conditioned to despise. Equally bad is if the killing is the result of the inability to get proper mental health care; just another cost of doing business as far as the health care lobby is concerned.

The solution, by now, should be obvious. Part of it involves stricter gun laws, closing loopholes, and better mental health care, obviously. But to truly put this madness to rest we must identify and dismantle those things that pull our communities apart, that promote fear for its own sake, and leave us isolated from each other.

In the past, communities have most often risen above violence, hate, natural disaster, or any other severe shock by coming together, forging new links, opening new avenues of communication and understanding. We must do the same to clear away the toxic smog that obscures our view of each other.