Human Nature

JFK, RFK, King, Oklahoma City, 9/11, Virginia Tech, Tucson.

These are events that have been seared into the nation's collective memory.

"Where were you when Kennedy was shot?"

"Remember the morning of 9/11?"

"She was only 9 years old."

We are shocked and angry and for about thirty seconds we are all one people, united in our grief.

But then comes second number thirty one.

Business as usual. It's yesterday's news. Literally. Already, today, we are talking about Tunisia and Steve Jobs and the ubiquitous Sarah Palin.

Tucson happened. We screamed. The echoes died down. We're back at Starbucks schmoozing about Oprah's "revealing" perfrormance on Piers Morgan.

It's human nature.

And because of that nothing will change. We always clamor for change in the wake of a national tragedy. But nothing ever really changes. (See: Burt Reynolds at the end of "The End"...)

We were torn apart by Vietnam but now we have not one but two wars. Maybe that's because the population of the US in 1967 was 198,712,000 people. Now it's over 308,400,000. I guess we need two wars just to break even.

We really didn't seem to learn anything from our experience in Southeast Asia. If we had, maybe we wouldn't have been so quick to rush into Afghanistan and then Iraq, despite the alleged terrorist threat.

We just revert to yesterday's behavior. Yesterday it was sunny and we didn't need an umbrella, didn't even own one. Today it rained torrentially. We got soaked and swore up and down that we'd get an umbrella...and we did...actually three. Then we put them in the closet and completely forgot we had them. More to the point, it was too difficult to go get them because they were buried under all of the other junk that had piled up over the years. Then, a few days later, it rained again and we got soaked again and we swore up and down that we'd get an umbrella...and we did...this time 5.

Etc.

We have very short memories. And we don't seem to want to change. We argue and yell and scream at each other and hunker down into our positions and become hardened to the other guy's point of view. We're right, they're wrong and they can go to hell...literally...and if they keep talking we just might help them get there sooner than then they expected...by force if necessary...which , of course, is the hallowed "American Way."

Read Stanley Fish and Bob Herbert in Today's New York Times. Fish on Palin and Herbert on guns. Opposing points of view well written and cogent. Calls to action.

But we won't read them, collectively, as a country. Liberals will listen to liberals and conservatives will listen to conservatives and we will go deeper and deeper into the morass of devolution.

The anger will continue and the rhetoric will be darker and more venomous with no end in sight.

Folks in Tucson have been flooding gun stores to buy more weapons and ammunition.

It seems to me that that response is exactly wrong. It was a gun and ammunition that caused the problem. And it was in the hands of a lunatic who thought the answer to his problems was to kill somebody. And that comes from the language of our culture and the celebration of violence exalted by our media, entertainment and politicians.

Gun sights as a campaign graphic? No apologies for the obvious, resultant action?

As Yogi famously said, "It ain't over 'til it's over."

Well, my friends, I hate to be the first to tell you this, but I think it's...