There are two things I want to write about today that, at first glance, seem incongruous.

One is the 13th anniversary of the murder of 26 children and educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Eleven days before Christmas, a person who had just slain his mother went to the school and fired an automatic weapon at 6- and 7-year-olds and the adults responsible for them.

The other is the wanton sinking of Venezuelan fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea by the United States military. So far, as of Wednesday afternoon, the death toll is 87 people, with some still missing. 

Trump and his lush Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, claim the boats are carrying fentanyl to the United States – which is damn near impossible given the fact that these boats would have to refuel multiple times to make it the closest U.S. port. And the seizing of a tanker Wednesday could escalate the crisis further.

So here’s what they have in common:

Dehumanization.

Self-indulgence.

Bloodlust.

Cowardice.

And the dismantling of the idea that this nation is a great beacon of freedom, opportunity and fairness.

Dehumanization: I’m sorry that even the start of the piece contributes to that.

When we think of Sandy Hook and the Caribbean, we see numbers. Numbers that can be seen as either a lot of people or just a microfragment of the world’s population.

That’s not what they are.

They’re lives. They’re a woman who dedicated her life to educating children. They’re a fisherman looking to catch some tuna to feed his family. They’re a little girl who loves science and might have been on track to cure a form of cancer.

They’ve been reduced to victims. They will not get old or prosperous or fall in love. They will stay who they were.

And they leave families to grieve. To ask why. To feel guilt for something they didn’t control. To feel the loss forever – anyone who thinks a grieving mother, father, child or spouse ever actually “gets over it” is a moron.

So why are these good people – young or grown – gone?

Self-indulgence.

This idea that an individual should be able to have whatever weapon he (and it’s mostly he) wants so he can hear the bang bang, smell the sulfur and feel the groovy recoil. That it’s a right established in the Constitution that they walk around with these mass murder machines at any time and use them when they perceive a threat.

And, as much as it sickens me to repeat this, the flip comments of the NRA goon after Sandy Hook was that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. 

As if the people who do the shooting don’t perceive themselves as good guys. As if a good guy with a gun has actually stopped any mass murders in the 13 years since.

In Venezuela, the self-indulgence is the idea that American taxpayers have given their dollars for weaponry that’s just sitting there. If you’ve ascended to the power to use it, why not? It’s not your money. But they’re your toys. 

And if you want to show toughness, show what a real man you are, wiping out fishing boats without due process or warning isn’t any different that killing monsters in a video game.

Bloodlust. Proving your manhood by killing people. 

There are people who think that, if you showed the mangled bodies of children massacred in an elementary school, it would stop such shootings. 

BS. All it would do is give the gunmen aspirations. Could the next one do a better job of wreaking revenge for who knows what.

If you don’t indulge your bloodlust directly, you tell people you control to kill people. How members of the U.S. military, with a history of integrity and ethics, can honorably live the rest of their lives after what’s happened in the Caribbean is an exercise in either self-delusion or murder.

Or cowardice. When Hegseth faces judgment for what he’s done, he’ll say he didn’t pull the trigger. That he was acting in America’s best interest. That he was following the instructions of his commander-in-chief.

He will be the one arguing – in a federal courthouse or before an international tribunal – that the soldiers pressing the missile launcher had free will. This after he tried to court-martial Mark Kelly for saying soldiers are obligated to follow illegal orders.

The gunman at Sandy Hook took the easy way out. He killed himself when he heard the police coming. He faced no judgment from any human. If you believe in God, maybe he faces some consequences in the afterlife – if you don’t, he got away with it. 

He won’t be reading this screed or any other condemnation. The book is closed on his miserable existence. 

That brings me to my last point. American greatness.

You and I were raised to believe this is the greatest nation on earth. It wasn’t that far-fetched. We cured diseases, put men on the moon, created jazz, baseball and Oreo cookies. We went without a king or queen for 248 years, helped rescue the world from fascism, made English as universal a language as there is on this planet.

Yes, we enslaved Black people for hundreds of years. Yes, we stole land from people who were here first. And yes, we treated women like property. But we aspired to be better and, over time, we’ve been getting there. There was a long way to go, but it felt doable. In order to form a “more perfect union.” That “more” is essential.

But we’ve decided that this is too much. Too many decided that being great is about throwing your weight around, looking like a tough guy, scaring instead of loving. Me first instead of all of us together.

There is nothing incongruous about Sandy Hook and the effort to drag us into a war against Venezuela. It’s the same weakness, meanness, pettiness, self-interest that has plagued our country for way too much of our lives.

Our elected representatives did nothing – absolutely nothing – to try to prevent future Sandy Hooks. Our current representatives are doing nothing – absolutely nothing – to stop the loss of innocent Venezuelans and American soldiers.

How can a nation this small of heart, this self-consumed, this disregarding of humanity claim greatness? That’s what you and I need to overcome to get us back to what we think we should be.