These times try souls.

Toxic icebergs drift about in the ocean of our consciousness, killing little fish and endangering the sea’s capacity to nurture lifeforms. What I’m talking about is the utter and complete powerlessness within our social and political ecosystem to stop the killing of children in schools.

How did our collective priorities become so distorted that we place a rationale for gun ownership above the preservation of the lives of our children?

Over the years I have heard some in this country imply that people in other parts of the world do not value life like we do. One of the suppositions offered is that there are so many people elsewhere that other nations have felt they can easily afford to lose a few. Another is that others’ belief systems do not cherish the life of the individual to the extent that the U.S. belief system does. During both the Korean and Vietnam wars, I can recall some of our leaders intimating such xenophobic malarkey.

But right here, right now in America we are actually undervaluing life, not just spouting prejudicial comments about how other people in the world supposedly do that. We are discounting the value of the lives of our children for a cause that is both nebulous and suspect.

What’s more important, your AR-15 or your kid? Well, it’s the former, stupid. Look around.

That the bodies of scores of children are so wantonly blown apart is only one dimension of the problem we have created for ourselves. Thousands of tremulous young minds sit in witness to every shredded corpse.

One commentator after the most recent school shooting analogized a relationship between active shooter drills, now prevalent in schools, and the drills we septuagenarians experienced in the 1950s – “duck and cover” exercises – because the Russians might drop an atom bomb on us. My recollection is that we enjoyed the five-minute interlude, hiding under our wooden desks unsure about why we were doing it and without any reference points to inform us or scare us.

Not so for kids today. They know the threat is real. They have seen the visual evidence to corroborate the horror. They know that ordinary-looking people could come into their school and annihilate a bunch of kids. It has happened, it could happen here. And there are easily accessible pictures to prove it.

The stakes are wholly different today. Under our desks in the 1950s, we had no such reference material – we knew nothing of real instances and real consequences. We never saw video footage of a group of kids being led along the sidewalk, hand in hand, after yet another massacre.

What, therefore, is the residual state of consciousness that we carry with us from all this? It is that we, including those we have empowered as our leaders, can’t even achieve step one toward adjusting priorities in favor of life over self-inflicted carnage. The system is gridlocked.

The painful conclusion: Americans don’t value life. They’re willing to sacrifice their youngest to the machinery of death.

Is there an alternative conclusion I’m missing?

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