©2024 By Chris Zappa
It’s no secret that in modern-day America, we are burdened with an endless list of recurring traumatic phenomena that, by any conventional standards, should be considered radically abnormal.
However, as is typical for survivors of sustained trauma, we find ourselves desensitized to the horrors we now collectively accept as part of daily life in this crumbling country, which, for better or worse, we have to call home. Take, as just one horrific example, the now daily occurrence of mass shootings.
An atrocious manifestation of a grievously broken society, mass shootings are now a daily occurrence in the United States. We have no other choice but to move through battlefields masquerading as communities as best we can in an attempt to carry on with the business of our daily lives, hoping we don’t die from such unnatural causes.
Mass shootings now happen with such disturbing frequency that they are no longer considered alarming but merely par for the course—just another typical day in the so-called “land of the free.” For decades now, the constant barrage of mass casualty tragedies has numbed our collective consciousness and has forced upon us an aberrant acceptance of “this is just how it is now.”
In a just world, our government would have long ago done the bare minimum of serving its purpose to protect us from the senseless, recurrent loss of innocent lives; however, no such just world exists. Instead, we bear the inequitable burden of a battered and bruised body politic, which not only doesn’t do anything to make us safer but, in fact, does all it can to make an egregious situation even worse.
Just so far, in the month of June 2024, there have been forty-nine mass shootings in the United States, and there’s another week to go in the month.
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