As of this writing, there have been eleven shootings in Dayton within two weeks. Twenty-one people have sustained gunshot wounds. Six have lost their lives. Further violence continues to be licensed, rewarded, and even celebrated by a complete lack of consequences levied by far too many prosecutors and judges.
We have exceeded divisiveness and reached the point of operating like a third world country. We kill for sport in order to be noticed and celebrated on Facebook. Even animals don’t conduct the business of survival this way.
When a former president and presidential candidate comes within 2 millimeters of assassination, we may have just gone too far down the rabbit hole to rescue ourselves from total disaster and disintegration as a nation. We have turned our community into a battlefield and a bloodbath. We have become what we despise the most. We have transformed ourselves into an assassination generation.
How do we unpack the continued horror that befalls us at our own hands? We have become consumed by our own vitriol like shark bait for no more than the need to vindicate ourselves for some presumed insult or simply because we disagree. That we have sunk to the levels below the trenches makes us no better than tapeworms. We have become monsters in our own right, free to commit the most heinous of acts because it sells well on social media. We have completely failed to realize that we are not bulletproof and that children should not have access to pistols modified to be fully automatic weapons with extended magazine and for which the only intended purpose is to kill and maim. Decency and grace and humanity have disappeared.
If nothing else, we must realize that it may just have been the Hand of God that saved lives at the Trump rally and that a miracle was witnessed by the multitudes on scene. We need the same sort of phenomenon right here in our community, a huge wakeup call that launches us into something that may better guarantee the survival of the species and to save us from such savagery and barbarism. This is not about partisan politics, but about the last hope for our nation and for our humanity, which has been lost in a sea of digital devices that dictate how we should live our lives. Our differences that inspire hatred and the desire to kill what we despise is drawing far too much blood. We have spiraled so far out of control, led by an enormous aversion to anything with which we disagree, that we have completely lost our way in the world.
We’d better start praying. The fear is that we have not yet seen the worst. Otherwise, the light at the end of the tunnel will be an oncoming train.
Dr. Kathy Platoni, Psy.D., DAAPM, FAIS, COL (RET), US Army, is a clinical psychologist.
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