Bob Herbert is often angry, and he’s almost always correct. While most columnists (even at the liberal NYT) pussyfooted around the issue of the Bush Administration’s ineptitude and brazen lawlessness, he came after them early and often. And with complete accuracy.
If Paul Krugman is the (self-described) “conscience” of the liberals, Herbert is the town crier for common sense. His only “agenda” is pointing out the myriad hypocrisies and injustices that provide the stimuli for which violence and crime are usually the responses. As such, he tends to tackle numbingly familiar yet consistently overlooked topics like poverty, education, and senseless murder. The type of unsavory topics that are easy to dismiss as depressing. (And like Krugman was, and to an extent remains, easy to dismiss as a nagging pessimist, it is too simple, and tempting, to marginalize Herbert’s concerns as the obsessions of a crank.) Of course, for both of these columnists, it is precisely because the issues they confront are depressing that they warrant honest examination. It is, obviously, a lonely and very uphill struggle, but we are fortunate they are willing to trudge along, alone.
Today’s reflection (accurately entitled The American Way) on our country’s insane addiction to guns is top tier Herbert:
This is the American way. Since Sept. 11, 2001, when the country’s attention understandably turned to terrorism, nearly 120,000 Americans have been killed in nonterror homicides, most of them committed with guns. Think about it — 120,000 dead. That’s nearly 25 times the number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the most part, we pay no attention to this relentless carnage. The idea of doing something meaningful about the insane number of guns in circulation is a nonstarter. So what if eight kids are shot to death every day in America. So what if someone is killed by a gun every 17 minutes.
Murderous gunfire claims many more victims than those who are actually felled by the bullets. But all the expressions of horror at the violence and pity for the dead and those who loved them ring hollow in a society that is neither mature nor civilized enough to do anything about it.
(The above song, “Throw Away Your Gun” is by the great reggae toaster Michael James Williams, aka Prince Far I. He was shot in his home during a robbery, and died in 1983.)
