There Are No Exit Signs in Plato's Cave

 

    Yesterday, a friend of mine in New York City sent me a link to Matthew McConaughey's impassioned speech in the White House Press Briefing Room. I'd already seen it on Lawrence O'Donnell's show via Raw Story and Youtube. While O'Donnell may have lauded McConaughey's speech to the heavens, somewhat for good reason, he lost the point just as McConaughey had.

     McConaughey brought to Washington some street creds. He, after all, is a native of Uvalde, Texas and, as he reminded us, went to an elementary school not one mile from Robb Elementary. He was on a movie set when his phone blew up and, like any socially-conscious celebrity in his position, he packed up his wife and kids and drove down to Uvalde to speak with the families the day after the massacre.

     But this week's speech in the briefing room as with McConaughey's first statements after the shooting stopped well short of any actual solutions and he resorted, then and now, to emotional but vague generalities. So, when my friend emailed me the link to his speech, he'd made it plain that he had reached the same conclusions that I had.

     So I'm going to unpack my response to him yesterday and talk a little bit about Plato's Cave.

     And that's where we necessarily all are, where we've all been relegated after every single school shooting. I'd alluded to the ignorance forced upon us when police authorities and the radical right wing refuse to allow us to see the crime scene photos. Because they know releasing those pictures and making us see the carnage of mass shootings carried out by AR15s would immediately represent a turning point, a corner that cannot be unturned.

     Because numbers alone aren't enough to convey to us the horrors that had awaited the EMTs and crime scene techs in those fourth grade classrooms at Robb Elementary. The closest we've come to it were when President Biden and McConaughey reminded us that DNA and sneakers were needed to identify the young victims. But it's about time we stopped settling for what our beleaguered imaginations can tell us. 

 

 

     It's time we got the fuck out of Plato's Cave.

     Now, in case any of you never read Plato's Allegory of the Cave or if you forgot Mike Flannigan's treatment of it in 2018, I'll explain the basics of it to you. As stated then, Plato's Cave was about enlightenment or, rather, the enforced lack of it. Plato posited being in a cave your entire life. You're deep underground and have no clue that there's a world above you.

     Plato then further went on to state that what would pass for enlightenment would be a very limited palette of stimuli. In Plato's allegory, that would amount to shadow puppets cast on a stone wall and thrown off by torch light. Without a chance for escape, those shadow puppets, cast by mysterious beings with mysterious intentions, becomes our sole frame of reference, the totality of our reality.

     It's a good philosophical hypothesis because, of course, one doesn't have to live in a cave their whole life to be blinkered and fooled. You can expand it to the entire world above ground, where deception nowadays, as in Plato's allegorical cave, is key.

     As I wrote my friend yesterday, we're all figuratively living in Plato's cave because of the untrue narratives, the missed points that supplant the ones we ought to be making. And the only way out of that cave is to be fully informed of the facts even if it means forcing ourselves to watch school shooting porn.

     As my friend Stan Banos said on his own blog, we need to see those pictures out of Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Robb Elementary so we can see the aftermath of what our children saw, what they're up against every time they go to school. We need to see the consequences of the misactions and inactions, of what got gun executives excited after Sandy Hook when they cheerfully emailed each other regarding a "Newtown bump", meaning a bump in gun sales.

     Last summer, during the trial that wound up costing Remington $73,000,000, they sent in the discovery phase tens of thousands of files containing cartoons and emojis that had nothing whatsoever to do with the Newtown shooting that was carried out by Adam Lanza and Remington's AR15. That's how much contempt executives showed not only the court but the parents whose children were butchered at Sandy Hook.

     But what else can you expect from corporate cunts that gleefully wrote emails to each other licking their chops and rubbing their hands at the thought of increased gun sales after a mass shooting?

     And this is all part of the information blackout that prevents us from making truly informed demands and decisions regarding our childrens' safety. As I'd written my friend last night, we're all on the outside looking in, except the windows have been papered over. We are all in Plato's Cave. After every school shooting, we're fed a steady diet of platitudes and lies and hoarse screaming about how "the radical left" is trying to "politicize" every school shooting.

     Well, why shouldn't they be politicized, considering it's right wing politicians who refuse to do anything toward advancing even the most middling and tepid gun control and gun safety laws?

     But the lead-lined opacity has to stop now. We need to see the pictures, horrifying as they may be. We need to see what our defenseless children are up against. We need to see the hideous consequences of Republican inaction.

     Matthew McConaughey made some good points in his emotional speech in Washington this week. We should keep our childrens' dreams alive through the memories and the efforts of the living. But that's not all we owe them.

     We owe it to them to make sure that this never happens again and that their lives weren't worth much less than NRA campaign contributions. We need to make sure children, six year-olds, never have to ask their parents, "What picture will you use of me?" Our children are already resigned to die some day in a mass shooting because even at six years-old, they expect adults to fail them just as those cops failed the fourth graders at Robb Elementary.

     Because right now, the only thing we have to a guarantee that this won't happen again is summer vacation. But then in late August, early September, we'll be right back to where we were on May 24th.