Nothing symbolizes the foreclosure of the future like the slaughter of a nation’s young. Another word for that bitter fatalism is “defeat.”And we have been, in an important moral sense, defeated. Regular mass gun violence is a particularly American phenomenon, and it’s dissolving society in a particularly American way. It’s likely the case that the killings alone would be enough to vastly damage social cohesion and public morale. But our utter inability to contend with them is far more acidic to the ideas on which our American experiment depends.

Source: Washington Post February 15, 2018 19:40 UTC