re: #194 goddamnedfrank

Yeah, it’s easy for people who live in countries with universal healthcare to grasp how completely fucked and on their own the mentally ill are in the United States.

The mentally ill are fucked everywhere. Universal health care doesn’t make that magically better. Humans are still humans, and every country underfunds and undertreats the mentally ill.

The elephant in the room that this nation cannot acknowledge is that here, they have free and easy access to guns. And they have this access because America slavishly worships guns, and values guns over the lives of its children.

But to acknowledge that is taboo, so we can’t talk about the elephant in the room. Instead we have to pretend that if only we can achieve the impossible and treat the mentally sick perfectly, the national gun fetish will all be okay.

It’s like if every oven in the nation was powered by nitroglycerine, and exploding ovens killed tens of thousands of people every year. And every time it happened, people shrugged and said, ‘Well, we’ve just got to do a better job of inventing cold fusion.’