Steve CoxKonto zweryfikowane

(And we shame people for rejecting these rituals - think here of the work done by the admonition in the wake of tragedy not to "politicize" them, what that actually demands: "how dare you do something other than grieving publicly in service of a status quo of depoliticization")

And finally, and this is the darkest, most twisted dimension of this neoliberal paradigm: we construct an elaborate series of rituals and performances for "honoring" the "sacrifice" of exemplary victims of senseless, entirely preventable butchery while doing nothing about it.

Please understand me here. I am not saying that these murders are not obscenities. I am not saying that the actions of so many victims is not heroic and selfless beyond imagination. They are. After each of these, the stories, they just destroy me.

I am saying that our heartbroken, anguished praise of children and teachers who are martyred holding open doors or shielding other people from gunfire indexes how normal and inevitable the demand for the ultimate unnecessary, supererogatory labor has been made in our system.

To be very clear, and I'm closing this up: our neoliberal definition of "safety," now as a matter of course involves and demands people dragooned into dying for it. The run/hide/fight mantra, the talk of "delaying" shooters?

What this means, very practically, is that we expect people to rush killers armed with military-grade weapons, to use their own bodies as barriers, to soak up bullets and force shooters to reload, to buy time and keep them localized until the authorities arrive.

And I can't imagine a more nutshell example of neoliberalism than this: demanding a nation's citizens - training our children - to throw themselves like human sandbags against a problem that shouldn't exist in the first place, but that does, because of profit. /end

(I realize, looking at the length of this, I probably could have just made it into an article for somebody. If any editors are interested in an expanded version of this, there's much more to say, and I'd be happy to write it, drop me a DM or an email).