Point of View: Oderint, Dum Metuant

So, is it to be AR-15s for all? One would think so given the shoulder-shrugging by officialdom that greets massacre after massacre. Oh well, there will always be crazies — a few bad eggs in the barrel. Can’t let them spoil it for everyone, this being a God-fearing and gun-loving country.

So, yes, avail everyone of an AR-15 — as tends to be done on a global scale with nuclear weapons. If everyone has one, mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) will act as a deterrent. Just kidding. I’m of a contrary mind, to wit, that the fewer weapons of mass destruction (including AR-15s) there are available to people the less they will be used.

And speaking of mass destruction on a really mass scale — of Armageddon, if you will — isn’t it time to come clean, isn’t it time to count up all the pernicious weapons in each country’s arsenals, and to, under some kind of international scientific oversight, begin to whittle down their number, arriving some day in the distant future at zero. There used to be a lot of talk about nuclear nonproliferation, though not so much, it seems, anymore. The opposite in fact on the home front, where it’s rip up this, tear up that. Frankly, it’s a tossup in my mind as to whether I have more to fear from our president or from Iran.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders says the media is to be blamed for not embracing her boss’s agenda. Whatever that is. If it’s to sow fear far and wide, in this country and abroad, that’s not an agenda — a reasoned plan aimed at achieving certain salubrious goals — but a tactic. 

What was it Caligula said? Ah, yes, Oderint, dum metuant. “Let them hate me so long as they fear me.”

By now we will know whether we have acquiesced to this kind of governance, one which speaks with a forked tongue, which preens and casts blame, whose sole aim, it seems, is self-promotion and self-aggrandizement rather than working toward the general good. 

The more I see of what’s going on in our homeland, the more inclined I am toward World Federalism.

Paying attention to scientists — at least to those many working to better our lot rather than to those turning out more and more demoniacal weaponry — could in the end save us. 

Will we some day be delivered from the grip of the Know-Nothings? I don’t know.