-Mercury-

Before the week was over, my letter appeared in The Mercury:

It is only the pleasure of an angry reader, and the shortage of anti-anxiety medication that prompts me to write to this Pulitzer prize winning newspaper. Charley Reese had the misfortune of appearing in these pages March 30, a day I had the leisure of time and energy to become sufficiently outraged by another pithy talking head who hasn’t the eloquence or sex appeal to garner guest spots on the tube. If I unfairly single him out, remember that

a) he started it, and
b) you should have seen the adjacent column. That guy thinks Joe McCarthy had a pretty neat idea.

For those of you who missed “school shooters” March 30, 2005. Here is an outline of Reese’s comments:
Don’t blame guns
Don’t blame poverty
“Why are young people so unhappy?”
Blame feminism
Blame television/Hollywood
Blame school girls wearing short skirts
Blame advertising

Oversimplification, or a party line primer? The amazing thing about all this is not that Reese is indistinguishable from his shallow colleagues. Actually, he comes close to identifying the big question despite himself.

“If you take away the poverty and guns, then you are left with the person and the person’s mind.” Well, no, you can’t separate those any more than you could separate the human mind from advertising, television, feminism, or the short skirts that entice and worry you so much. But to acknowledge that all human actions originate in the human mind, that’s something we can talk about. And we’d better, because government wonks and their media retainers are only talking from the outline above, or from the slightly different one the other party uses.

Their small minds are intractable. We won’t make that mistake. We’re regular guys and girls who read (or don’t) who vote (or don’t), who feel guilt when we sin, (or feel guilt without accepting one theological or moral definition of sin.) And we regulars accept as a matter of course that the efforts of a few thousand irregular committee members nationwide can never reduce every human mind to the same frequency, and they will never hear them all, no matter how fast the technology. The few homicidal wavelengths hiding among our millions can only be identified by dumb luck. Indeed, the luck of regular people listening to their surroundings is the only thing that has ever worked to prevent horrible human actions.

That is the only reason to be happy or unhappy.