How I Spent My Feast Of The Holy Innocents Day

Some people recovered from Christmas.
We got back home from our trip to Bountiful ( i.e., anywhere my granddaughter is ) a little past midnight, arriving early on Childermas - the feast of the children that the gospels say Herod put to the sword as he sought to slay new-born Jesus.

Some people acted out the rituals of the sacred dogma of weapons, however. Some of us did not dodge their duties on a generally recognized gun day celebration - יום האקדח - jour de l'arme - whatever. Some of us went out and slaughtered innocents.

8-Year-Old Boy Shot to Death Walking Home from Birthday Party
Deborah Hastings
Inside EditionDecember 30, 2016
https://www.yahoo.com/news/8-old-boy-shot-death-004400280.html

An 8-year-old boy was shot and killed as he walked home from a cousin’s birthday party, authorities said.
Rasheed Cunningham Jr. had left the gathering just a few doors down from his Dania Beach, Florida, home and was walking with several other family members when shots rang out Wednesday evening, according to the Broward County Sheriff’s office.


His grandmother collapsed in grief outside the home she shared with Rasheed, when she learned he was dead, CBS Miami reported. Rasheed's birthday is Jan. 9.

A neighbor told the station that a black car pulled up and someone jumped out wearing a ski mask and fired round after round into the group.
“You can hear ‘pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow,’ then they jump back in the car, slam the door and went back in reverse,” said Veronica Larkens...

I used to just skip by this mortality stuff. If we wanted weapons so badly then we must accept a few sacrifices, a few "statistics", just as we do for automobiles and roads. Here in Michigan we have so benighted a government that it saves money by inadequately funding roads and the legislature accepts the inevitable highway fatalities with a macabre glee!
It goes with the territory.
So also with weapons and guns. If we wish to have a political religion of Weapons, a dogma Second Amendment, then we must accept the correlated increase in deaths here and there. It is just like fireworks: once we made all fireworks legal, people began blowing their body parts off - just like in the old days when such maiming led to the outlawing of those fireworks. I think there were a couple of sports figures who seriously maimed themselves in the past 3 trips around the old Sun.

These things are acceptable statistics that go with our better way of life

A big thumbs up for the collateral damage of deaths of innocents that goes with unrestrained Saturnalia of arms and weapons.


The important part of all this is the mere fact that we argue about it.
When we speak of young Rasheed being killed, some may say it was due to social factors, such as his neighborhood, and say the fatalities are caused by poverty or urban decay or something else.

I say, however, that it is all one. The culture is an emergent phenomenon that is greater and different from the sum of its parts. Therefore, we cannot understand the culture by merely going back and looking at its parts.


Having spent time with my granddaughter, when I read now about children being killed everywhere in the world, it breaks my heart.
We are playing Herod.

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December Can Be The Cruelest Month

Today is Boxing Day, or ST. Stephen's; tomorrow is Holy Innocents or Childermas, the feast commemorating children slaughtered by the order of King Herod, who wished to ensure that the new born child Jesus was killed, and no longer pose a threat to his dynasty's rule.

Ironic that the Birth and Death of children is celebrated in December.

The Newtown Massacre was in December.
The Peshawar Massacre in Pakistan was in December.

And in 1984, Bhopal was in December.

Der Spiegel
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/disaster-persists-30-years-after-bhopal-gas-catastrophe-a-1006101.html

This December marks the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal gas disaster, which is still the biggest chemical accident in history. It was even worse than the uncontrolled dumping of waste containing mercury in the Japanese city of Minamata, and its long-term effects are perhaps comparable only with those of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Some who feel reminded of the scope of the disaster caused by the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima call the Bhopal disaster "Bhoposhima."

[...]

In the poor residential neighborhoods over which the gas cloud descended in 1984 and where the worst of the toxic residues remain today, there is a disabled child living in one in seven huts. The rates of premature births and stillbirths in women who were exposed to the gas are about three times the national average. But there is a lack of long-term scientific studies. No government agencies and no hospitals in the city keep track of the abnormalities. Midwives from the neighborhoods, who practiced before the accident and have observed developments over the years, report gruesome abnormalities, including fetuses with greenish skin and deformed heads. "The birth of a child is normally a reason to celebrate," explains Parwati, who is from a family of midwives. "But in this area a birth comes as a shock to many parents."

The company responsible was Union Carbide's Indian subsidiary. Union Carbide is now owned by Dow Chemical.

These companies are among the entities that our Supreme Court has endowed with rights surpassing our rights, with the right to influence elections with voices far louder than our individual voices.

Skynet has already sent in his advance guard of corporate citizens free to commit crimes with the back-up troops of mindless governments.

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