Over the last few months in the USA — and across the world ashore — it appears we now prefer to burn our women and children on the altar of a consecrated, conservative, authoritarian, religioso, madness! It’s Leda and the Swan now embedded forever in The Marble Palace — and there’s no clear way out of separating alarming myth from tragic reality. Now the majority women don’t control their bodies anymore. Now the minority swans own their bodies.

This conservative values war isn’t limited to just women and children. They are aiming for the all of us to keep us all in line with their punishing cruelty. Over just the July 4 weekend we had 220 Americans killed and 21 of us were shot, and three of us were killed in New York City alone.

In Highland Park, Illinois — also on July 4 — two-year-old toddler Aiden McCarthy’s parents were shot and killed during a parade by a madman on a rooftop leaving him alone in the world without his mother and father. Aiden’s father died while covering his son with his body. Six others died that day.

It appears we cannot have too many guns. If I have a six-shooter, my fearful neighbor must have an assault rifle to feel safe around me, and if I want to feel safe around my aiming, armored, neighbor, then I guess I need to have a bazooka, to outgun his assault rifle and so on and so on and so on.

Neighborhoods with lots of dogs are a great deterrent to fearfulness, but, it seems, that solution is just too fun, too loving, and too easy a solution to make neighbors feel safe in a bullet-fed national hungering for blood and bodies.

In the war against Ukraine, Russia feels not a moment of regret, or despair, dropping a bomb on a civilian home and killing a six-year-old in her sleep. There is no international outrage anymore. Killing children is old news, a second page story, and so suffering is limited to only the immediate family and others who pretend to care. The rest of the world shrugs and wonders what next horror will mount an attempt at attention getting — and we are never disappointed, or surprised, by what subsequent death becomes us.

A pregnant and abused 10-year-old child in Ohio had to travel to Indiana to get an abortion. There are rights and there are wrongs — and then there are the morally cruel who pick on the least among us to prove their power, and dominance, over those unable to defend themselves from the repression.

We are encouraged by some of our leaders to just “vote harder” when there is a viscous, vicious, evil, armed, tsunami rearing up against us, waiting to drown us in a Biblical flood of Armageddon proportion — smothering us in our grief and their rage — and, yet, in our stolid, and faithful, and eager defense, we are implored to just provide more “thoughts and prayers” for our victims, us, and the dead moldering around us. We are now left alone in our mourning with the world spinning out of control, and the Gods have rightly forsaken us for our mythmaking selves.