Day-after reflections

I'm exhausted.

Being a post-American in 2016 was already exhausting enough, but then along comes an event like the Pulse massacre and the ensuing free-for-all between the various factions of our fractured society. At my core there remains an unshakable conviction that there is a good, right, sensible and noble way to approach life, but it's buried beneath the cacophony of the moment and this age save for a precious microsecond here and there.

In an attempt to systematize my thoughts on the matter, I'll take the various players and examine what their significance is.

The gun-control opportunists - Are you surprised at how quickly and loudly they chimed in? Just as they have with terms such as "gender fluidity" and "climate change," they have strung together a pair of words and coined a supposed concept - the "assault rifle" - that doesn't actually exist. And, once again, the scene of the horror was a gun-free zone, so nobody in that club was in a position to take Mateen down.

The LGBT "community" - There was a time, prior to the Stonewall Inn riot of 1969, when people with unconventional notions of companionship, intimacy or just plain pleasure-seeking sought their satisfactions without declaring some kind of demographic affiliation that needed to be championed. Then those who so declared showed themselves to be leftists even before they were homosexuals, lesbians, or bisexuals. That is, the juxtaposition of their now-established identity against the larger "establishment" took on the same class-struggle trappings as all leftist causes. We now had the beleaguered minority against some supposedly consciously organized majority determined to impose its supposed bigotry in perpetuity. And then came the slippery slope of the last - well, year, really. Hasn't it been basically in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling creating a "right" to homosexual "marriage" out of whole cloth that everybody up and down the block wants to be "transgendered" and the federal Justice Department has acted to force acceptance of this, in the form of an edict about restrooms, on anybody still clinging to what was normal in, say, 2014? And, of course, because there is no doubt that the survivors of those killed at Pulse indeed deserve our sympathy, there is pressure on the remaining Christians in post-America to once again zip it. And now those exerting the pressure have an exquisite form of leverage: Keep your mouth shut re: any talk of sin, or we'll lump you in with the jihadists who throw us off rooftops in Mosul, hang us in Tehran, or shoot up our nightclub in Orlando.

The Most Equal Comrade - Of course, he showed his gun-control-opportunist colors as soon as he could, and, as has been much noted, he didn't mention radical Islam, but perhaps his most nauseating assertion was that “we need the strength and courage to change.” There's always something wrong with the populace of his own country with this guy.

Donald Trump - His initial tweet, which once again demonstrates his lack of command of rudimentary syntax and punctuation, is also a classic glimpse into the way his Grand Canyon-size ego functions. He appreciates the congratulations for his prescience, but really he's not interested in it. And resolving the West's twilight struggle with a mortal threat is reduced to a matter of being "tough and smart." One thing he was actually right about was the Most Equal Comrade's failure to acknowledge the massacre as an act of jihad, but he pointed it up in such a ham-fisted way ("he should step down") that it gives ammunition to those eager to show what a bonehead he is. Of course, the Bots will eat it up.

Hillionaire - Not much to say here. She's been predictable in her response, wanting to cover all the bases: showing solidarity with the LGBT "community," grandstanding for gun control, positioning herself to the Most Equal Comrade's right - and thereby deny Squirrel-Hair a barking point - by naming radical Islam as the perp.

The jihadists - They will incinerate the nation's major cities when they have everything in place to do so, and they will turn any of the nation's surviving women and girls into sex slaves.

As you can see, with the above players consuming nearly all the oxygen in our national conversation, there is little room for the assertion of basic truths, such as the fact that post-America is under assault from both jihadists and cultural Marxists, and that ours is a safer society the greater the number of devotees of ordered liberty who are armed.

Not to mention the most over-arching point of all: Life in this nation is going to make even less sense and be even more fatiguing and painful as we go forward, because we are a stiff-necked people utterly uninterested in turning toward almighty God.