Guns and the Great Replacement

I don't own a gun, but I understand why for millions of Americans happiness is a warm gun. Guns make them feel powerful; they make them feel safe. As a white man, I don't fear being "replaced" (I feel more at home in cities where everyone doesn't look like me), but I know I'm being marginalized, exploited, turned into a number or "thing." In a society where the super rich get richer and they increasingly dominate the political overclass, the rest of us are indeed increasingly irrelevant.

So we go out and buy military-grade guns, we flock to movies that weaponize our fears of being losers, we vote for demagogues who blame our anxieties on immigrants and people with darker skin colors. and the craziest among us turn our guns on the defenseless.

Then our political leaders rush to express outrage and prayers, families grieve... and we repeat the cycle soon after. Nothing changes despite all the media fulminations. Because the periodic bloodbaths not only reinforce the power of the gun lobbies -- they reinforce the fear and division that serves our billionaire overlords. Divide and conquer -- that's been the cynical game of rulers throughout history. Same as it ever was...

It's true -- you're being replaced. But not by some immigrant from El Salvador. You didn't want her underpaid, off-the-books, backbreaking cleaning job. You've been replaced by Silicon Valley and Wall Street -- by human-replacing technologies and the elites that benefit from them. You've been replaced by tech giants that care only about mining your data, not about your souls.

Way back in the 1960s, the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley rose up against this looming dehumanization, telling university administrators not to "bend, fold, spindle or mutilate " our lives -- to treat students with as much respect as computer cards. Those protests against the "thingifying" of people now seem quaint.

But mass movements for radical change are the only experiences that can restore our humanity. Movements that bring together black, brown, yellow, red and white people against a common enemy -- the billionaire elite and the robot world they've ushered in for power and profit. Rise up, replaced people of all colors -- you have only to lose your computer chips.