the price of AK-47's

As the United States wriggles and writhes and postures and weeps in the wake of an elementary school massacre that left 20 children dead, the price of AK-47's is soaring in Afghanistan, a country the U.S. invaded in October 2001 using the now-U.S.-enshrined reasoning that Afghanistan harbored those responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, 'terrorist' attacks in the United States. The invasion helped to bolster the idea that going to war was acceptable if a country or group might damage or threaten the U.S.

Following the slaughter of school children in Connecticut, a Texas gun store owner has begun offering a discount to teachers.

“We need to start thinking out of the box and deal with this violent culture,” Keller told the station. “We need to lobby our various state governments to allow teachers to be armed.”

Do Afghans wriggle and writhe and posture and weep for their slaughtered children? I don't know, but I find it impossible to imagine that they don't. Industrialized or tribal ... what culture does not viscerally defy all ego-tripping when it comes to its children, its family, its blood? And yet what culture as well does not find reasons and excuses to put the kids and its blood on the back burner and scrounge up the price of the latest AK-47?

Strange to think: There is no prize in life for doing better, but there are definite penalties for doing worse. True, there are the charlatans and the merchant-minded who make a buck peddling virtue, but in reality as I see it ... there is no prize in life for doing better, but there are definite penalties for doing worse.