[This piece is unfinished, a work-in-progress, posted today for reasons that will become obvious upon reading. Please make a note to return at a future date to check its progress.]
It’s Valentine’s Day, February 14th, a day usually associated with roses, over-sized and over-priced tasteless chocolate-covered strawberries, pajama- or bear-grams, frantic attempts to get a last-minute dinner reservation, and amore for those who played the game successfully. I pity the fool who forgot it, especially since it is easily remembered as the day after Galentine’s Day.
It was on this date in 1929 that members of Al Capone’s gang lined 7 members of the “Bugs” Moran gang up against a wall in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago and opened fire with Thompson sub-machine guns—the so-called Saint Valentine’s Day massacre.
Today is also the anniversary of the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL. in 2018, which I will refer to simply as the Parkland shootings or just Parkland. This post is an indirect result of that event and what has followed, but not specifically about it, although that was my original intention when I began drafting it in May of last year. I intended to write about the lack of parental intelligence, sense, and control to prevent their children from being astroturfed as the faces of ready-made organized political agendas that were just waiting for the right triggering mechanism to occur in order to use them as poster children by a thoughtless insatiable sensationalist media and their audience; and of course, politicians, who used them up and spat them out for their purposes.
It sat for many months as I continued monitoring what was being written about the shootings and the related social and political side issues. I realized the public narratives became a microcosm of the hows and whys of our nasty state of social and political discourse. My intention changed to addressing a larger concern about how reporting and commentary about Parkland, or almost any other subject in the public domain with political overtones (what doesn’t!), has become symptomatic of a much larger pernicious and destructive paradigm.
