Nerf Guns for Girls

When I check my yahoo e-mail I get a listing of ‘searches trending now.’ Updated for the holidays, the list now reflects holiday gift searches that are ‘hot.’ Something is amiss in a world where a gun goes off in a theater and theater-goers think it was part of the movie previews, an employee returns to a holiday luncheon with his girlfriend and kills 14, and a man from Virginia drives all the way to Colorado Springs to take a stand against a fabricated video and narrative painting Planned Parenthood as ‘traffickers in babyparts.’

Then, as I listen to NPR, a very subtle piece of editorializing occurs as the reporter discussing the most recent ‘mass’ shooting noted that the guns used by the attackers are banned under California’s ‘very strict gun laws.’ Much as when Anderson Cooper responded to Bernie Sanders’ opening remarks on his platform by noting that ‘Norway’ has x-million people and the United States has 300 as if to cast false equivalence and an ineffectual stamp upon universal education and healthcare as feasible ideas to pursue in a political arena.

What kind of news is this? I used to complain that for some the ‘daily herald’ is their Facebook feed. Those who stand for the fourth estate merely represent another ‘network’ perhaps less friendly but nonetheless connected to us in so many ways.

And a reality emerges from these webs of significance, no matter how contingent or marginal they might factor into the lives of information consumers, leading those consumers to consume daily feeds of gun violence and to begin searching for ‘nerf guns for girls’ and rarely if ever make the connection.

Four hundred tons of irradiated water wash out to sea from Fukushima per day and what do we worry about? What Donald Trump said.

Maybe we should make America Great Again or maybe we should wake up and stop pretending that America was ever great.