Saddest thing you'll read today...

...in a deeply, nation-questioning, existential way. This isn't about politics, per se,  more it is about the calamity that our fraudulent FIRE* economy has wrought on those who aren't beneficiaries of those sectors.

Trust me, it'll make sense in a bit...

The wife of the man who held a Florida school board at gunpoint said Wednesday that her husband was a gentle giant who was pushed over the edge by the economy and frustrated over her losing her teaching job.

"He wanted to get me an answer," Rebecca Duke said a day after her husband, Clay Duke, killed himself. He shot at school board members in Panama City, missing some of them by mere inches, before he exchanged gunfire with a security guard. As he lay on the floor in the boardroom, he shot himself to death in the head.

Sounds like just a gun-crazed, anti-gub'mint 'winger, doesn't it? Someone who hates the Man, and just went off the deep end?

Well, he did go off the deep end, but not for the reasons you'd think: It wasn't a product of random hatred, or a tax-protestin' conspiracy nut, or a ranting unhinged man...his were the actions of desperation that our society has created in the burgeoning underclass...

"The economy and the world just got the better of him," Rebecca Duke said in a rambling press conference to talk about the man she loved.

There's more at the Miami Herald (I particularly enjoy trying to paint a despondent, broken man as a random lunatic, while ignoring the substance of what makes a man walk into a building and try to shoot those who fired his wife).

I am not for one instant condoning his actions, and am greatful that the body count was just one. However, I am deeply saddened that the country has fallen into such a balkanized state of haves and have nots such that violence seems the only way to respond. When you play by the rules, yet our bullshit illusory economy continues to shit on you, when our policy makers are blind, deaf and clinically fucking sociopathic, there is left nothing but a hollow, often-misplaced, impotent rage. 

And he felt it in spades.

[he] apparently created a Facebook page last week that refers to class warfare and is laced with images from the movie "V for Vendetta," in which a mysterious figure battles a totalitarian government.

So, America. Everyone is too big to fail except for we, the people; all 370 million of us who are extorted, cajoled, imprisoned and indebted by at least 40% of our income to pay for those privileged few. These weren't the first shots of a class war; the class war has been waged for a while now. However, these may be the first actual shots that will wake people up, and pay attention to the seething frustrations in our world. Ours is rapidly approaching a failed state, where the only thing keeping the minions in line is agitprop and the not-inconsiderate state violence inflicted on our citizens through a militarized police force.

Grab the popcorn...

The final lines are chilling: 

 

"My testament: Some people (the government sponsored media) will say I was evil, a monster (V) ... no ... I was just born poor in a country where the Wealthy manipulate, use, abuse, and economically enslave 95 percent of the population. Rich Republicans, Rich Democrats ... same-same ... rich ... they take turns fleecing us ... our few dollars ... pyramiding the wealth for themselves."

-d.s.

* FIRE, incidentally, refers to the sham "wealth" and prosperity that has fueled the economic machine for the past two and a half decades: Finance, Insurance, Real Estate. Much, much more to come on this when I get a few good hours.