Albertsons, Osco, Bushmaster – what do these corporations have in common?
They are all part of the Cerberus Group. That includes the Freedom Group unit that made the Bushmaster Rifle used in Sandy Hook mass murder to slaughter 20 babies and their educational guardians. The Freedom Group, which includes Remington and Marlin Firearms, is one of the largest gun manufacturers in the U.S.
Divesting is the opposite of investing. If we can, as the adage says, “Put our money where our mouth is,” we can also take our money away from where our mouth is. This was the strategy, the very successful strategy, used to change the actions of government and corporate financial groups and interests that propped up the Apartheid practices in South Africa, from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s. It is time for another massive divestiture. The cloak of normalcy must be pulled away from gun fetishism.
There is Nothing Normal about Enabling Slaughter of the Other
At some point we have to look at the beliefs that foster and enable problematic technologies and practices. Whether we are most concerned with “semi-” automatic, concealed, or ubiquity of weaponry, the horror and violence spawned by their use flashes a cultural warning sign directly at the heart of the propagating beliefs. The problems are not the weapons in and of themselves, nor our behavioral health and regulatory system practices that not only neglect situations with actionable treatments, but that foster the problems they purport to treat through unequal access, participation, and enforcement provisions.
This creation of an “other” in place of a “we” enables slavery , mass incarceration, and other horrendous disposal mechanisms that jettison living, breathing humans into and onto places and pathways that guarantee a meager existence for shortened and desperate lives.
There are Solutions
Not all change can be controlled. Significant change can be fostered. Real change can be quite abrupt and that can be not only disturbing but frightening.
What we women, and a few brave men, must do, is to commit to a change of kind, rather than an adjustments of amounts, within our society that will allow for related, but distinct, cultural change.
The U.S. is a very young country, within the context of civilization and empires, with a distinct and accordingly very new culture. Emergent systems experience rapid expansion and growth, and are far more volatile systems than more established ones. Culture is not an exception to this process.
We will have to examine the cultural systems and technologies but we must each act to support only those aspects of the larger culture that we can support with our hearts and souls that also align with our guiding documents created by the founders of our country. There has been a separation of ethics from process and I suspect this is due to the rapid expansion of the U.S. in a way that required a frontier mentality that is at odds with our core founding principles. We must rectify the selfish conquest and control mentality that flourished and still exists within fundamentalist thought whether it be religious or political fundamentalism that depends on needless creation and comparison to a mythical other to elevate oneself above that other.
Exercising choice over what we choose to breathe life into is not all that difficult. Do not buy from individuals and entities if you have severe objections to their business practices.
We have a choice.