Each day it seems we hear of yet another school shooting. In Uvalde, Texas, an 18-year-old bought some serious weaponry and thought it was a good idea to go kill 19 students and two teachers. The list of stories about kids killing kids started back in 1999 when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two social outcasts at Columbine High School in Colorado, went on a shooting rampage of revenge against their cooler peers. Columbine was the start and since then we have witnessed school shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, in a high school in Parkland, Fla., at Virginia Tech and so many more.

These events conjure up the first few lines of the W. B. Yeats poem “The Second Coming”,
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

Yeats was filled with foreboding following World War I and our times conjure up foreboding as well. COVID, global warming, incessant school shootings with children killing other children produces dark thoughts in this dark age of ours.

I spoke to a politician today and he thought that these gun violence problems are partially due to a lackadaisical, passive and ineffective group of lawmakers who cannot seem to do anything but talk. He admitted to me he was very worried about our nation. I think we are all worried about our nation and these times we live in.

The cause of mass shootings is multifactorial. This impulsive explosive rage is partly due to rampant mental illness that goes untreated. In addition, there is an increasingly alienated population lost in a virtual world of social media. Then there is a lack of gun control which has resulted in there being more guns in America then there are people.
The carnage seems to be mounting and we seem unmoved.

In a recent New York Times study of school shootings, it is now estimated that 311,000 children have witnessed gun violence since Columbine. This means that all these children have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder with troubled sleep, survivor guilt, startle reactions, hypervigilance and a foreclosed sense of future.

The middle stanza of Yeats’ “The Second Coming reads as follows:
“Surely some revelation is at hand,
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

So what, we might ask, is our revelation? Well, it doesn’t take a genius to see that fear and envy are all around us. Enough fear and envy to get kids to go out, buy guns and shoot classmates. Hatred seems to be growing daily. Rage mounts. We seem increasingly hungry and envious and feel we are missing out on things. And therefore the have-nots hate the haves based upon envy. And the haves hate the have-nots based upon arrogance, a virtual pandemic of hatred.

Yeats finishes his poem with these lines:
“And what rough beast, its hour comes round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Yeats was predicting the coming of the Second World War. We do not have to fear World War III since we’re already at war with ourselves.