America’s real enemy is America

‘Strength and violence are lonely gods.’

Albert Camus

A society which provides guns to its citizens but not healthcrare. A society in which lethal violence has been elevated to the status of a virtue and where compassion is considered a vice. A society born in violence and sustained by violence throughout its history.

This is America, where mass shootings have become such a regular occurrence they allow the rest of the world to ponder the social implosion they represent at a time when the land of the free has never been more at war with itself.

The latest instalment of mindless slaughter occurred at an elementary school in Texas. The shooter was just 18 years old, the same age as Payton Grendon, who carried out the mass shooting in Buffalo which left ten black people dead on 14 May, just ten days earlier. In Texas the gunman Salvador Ramos was killed by the police at the scene. Tragically, by then he’d managed to kill 19 students and two teachers to leave not only those lives destroyed, but also the lives of their loved ones left behind.

These regular mass shootings are the most brutal symptom of a culture in which lethal violence and war have long enjoyed hegemonic status; the ability to engage in both viewed as connoting strength, but then as Albert Camus so sagely put it: ‘Strength and…