Whence the Darkness?

“Hello darkness my old friend”- Simon & Garfunkel’s Sound of Silence.

Now IS NOT the time for silence. It is the time to rage against the darkness that we’ve lately seen on all sides:

There has been an alarming surge of violence against Asian and Asian American communities throughout the country, especially here in California. It’s not an especially new tension in this state (see: Japanese during internment camps and Koreans during the L.A. riots). Still, it is perhaps the most inexplicable in that it doesn’t seem to stem from any singular motive. Instead, it’s linked to an invisible set of interconnected and historical factors, such as Covid-19, fear-mongering, economic desperation, cultural stereotypes, and lack of cross-communal solidarity.- Alan Chazaro

Jessica Wildfire was right to point out that:

Mass shootings aren’t the product of sick minds.

They’re the inevitable result of a sick culture. And if we’re ever going to reduce the number of shootings, that’s how we have to view it — as a collective problem requiring a range of solutions.

Everywhere a culture develops, it also develops societal problems, such as a perception of some lives as less valuable than others. Some of those lives are human, and some are animal and some are floral.