America: What Must Change? (First of Three Parts)

By Mila D. Aguilar

Another day, another U.S. massacre

(Part I of III Parts)

Another day, another U.S. massacre. Fil-Ams who are quick on the draw will waste no time reminding us that we too have our own Maguindanao Massacre, but I wonder who of us are smart enough to see the similarities between the two.

Our own massacres never fail to be political in nature, whether of the narrow electoral or broader class warfare type. This one before the world now, like the Columbine or the more recent movie theater killings, is the work of a lone crazy, executed without apparent rhyme or reason.

And yet there is a deep underlying rhyme and reason to these crimes committed with ever greater frequency especially in the last four years.

Obama himself has just released the magic balloon out of his mouth in his fourth massacre visit: “We have to change.”

By which he should mean, America has to change.

Change what?

The American majority will soon elect to pass stricter gun control laws. Not astoundingly, indeed characteristically, some Republican outliers are starting to call for greater protection of children through -- you guessed it -- more guns in the hands of “responsible” principals and school staff.

When the news first broke, some even dared to suggest more thorough preliminary surveillance of American society’s mentally and psychologically disturbed! To suppress their quirky little brothers, it seems, Americans never fail to call on their Big Brother’s gall.

But notice the common thread that runs through these suggested solutions: GREATER CONTROL. To check the clay that’s running off of the Iron Man’s otherwise steely feet, the iron men and women of America suggest more effective binders.

They want to believe in democracy, but they can’t take where their “democracy” is taking them.

Therefore they have to exercise greater and greater control over their own citizens.

If they had listened to Michael Moore a little more closely after the Columbine massacre, they would have struck upon the solution by now.

But ah, they dismissed him as a fringe Leftist, even as a communist.

Michael Moore tried to go deeper into the American malaise by raking up U.S. history from the time of the Pilgrims. American history, he concluded, has been a history of fear: they armed themselves from the start first because of their fear of Indians and bears, then because of their fear of black slaves, then because of their fear of Russia, then Islam, and now -- their own citizens.

He implies that all this fear is used by the military-industrial complex to feed its arms factories, and therefore its coffers.

I don’t entirely agree with him, but at least he has gone further than the rest of the little minds that mold American media.

The overarching American problem is not fear, but a morbid obsession with control. The American fear factor comes about only when they cannot TAKE CONTROL over their lives, their society, the world.

It is this maniacal obsession with control that is leading their citizens to morphing into crazed zombies, capable of killing their own kind.

That is what needs to change, more than anything else.

Yesterday, I read two of the most insensitive attacks on the public reaction to the Newtown massacre. Both said, in effect, that people did not have the right to grieve over the Newtown deaths when they could not even sympathize with the mothers and children killed by American drones in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Grossly insensitive, but tragically true.

The truth is that America is going nowhere, and will continue to kill its own kind (aside from other kinds), because of its overarching maniacal compulsion to put the whole world under its big white thumbs, as if the whiteness of those thumbs will somehow cleanse all of mankind.

I will go further. This maniacal compulsion is a compulsion to Godhood.

The America that set out to evangelize the world about the Creator God is no more. The America we now see has taken on the attributes of God. It wants to be God Himself.

And that is the beginning of its end.

But I have just started. Let me elaborate my thesis in the next installments.