The similarities are so depressing. When John C. Calhoun reported on abolition
petitions to the Senate in 1837, he struck an indignantly self-righteous pose: “The
peculiar institution of the South that, on the maintenance of which the very
existence of the slaveholding States depends, is pronounced to be sinful and
odious, in the sight of God and man; and this with a systematic design of
rendering us hateful in the eyes of the world, with a view to a general crusade
against us and our institutions.” The peculiar institution of slavery, like the
peculiar institution of almost completely unregulated gun ownership,
distinguished us from the rest of the civilized world. But our "southern" compatriots, when confronted with the fact that our
society lay outside the bounds of the normal, insisted all
more hysterically on their right to be “sinful
and odious, in the sight of God and man.” Their eyes went red with fury; they
bellowed: “As if the mere fact that being reviled by the rest of the first world
could cause us to examine ourselves." Just as today they bellow: "As if the fact that the calling on ‘Congress today to act immediately to
appropriate whatever is necessary to put armed officers in every single school
in this nation’ is interpreted by our counterparts in the rest of the world as
lunacy is bad thing. Indeed!”
Like
the antebellum southern senators, the NRA-delusionals view themselves as persecuted minorities threatened by encroachment. John C. Calhoun and his friends adhered to
the “creed” that “teaches that encroachments must be met at the beginning, and
that those who act on the opposite principle are prepared to become slaves. In
this case, in particular, I hold concession or compromise to be fatal. If we
concede an inch, concession would follow concession compromise
would follow compromise, until our ranks would be so broken that effectual
resistance would be impossible.” So monotonously familiar.
Do
we really have to be hamstrung forever by these people and their modern-day
counterparts? Why did we not let them leave in 1861? Why must they remain a
part of our country today? Why do we not have
two countries, one inhabited by business people, farmers, teachers, builders, technicians,
professional athletes, doctors, lawyers, ministers, whatever, committed to a
society that gives equal opportunities to all and takes care of its
less-fortunate members, something we can surely afford to do, and one inhabited
by heavily armed unemployed itinerates foraging to scrape a living together who
spend all of their spare time trolling the internet with hate-mail to their
more enlightened former countrypeople? Two
countries, one committed to excellent public schools, the other to science-free
schools patrolled by armed guards (volunteers because there are no taxes to pay
them)? Two countries, one with a
well-maintained infrastructure, one of dilapidated cities and impassable roads?
Two countries separated by a heavily defended wall?
