Feel better?

I don’t know about you, but I’m extremely tired of listening to cops, mayors, governors and other officials asking us, in the wake of yet another mass murder by some troubled sociopath, to pray for the victims. It’s usually the first thing out of their mouths, a knee jerk call to pray for the victims. Yeah, well, you know what? Twenty million prayers and two bucks will get you a cup of coffee at Starbuck’s.

You want to actually do something that might help prevent future onslaughts of armed madness? Try this. Try taking that eentsy teentsy amount of mental energy you would use for your quickie prayer of compassion that, let’s face it, is being prayed so as to make you feel better, and use it instead to write to your congressman, suggesting to him that he stop fellating the paranoid tapeworm penis of the National Rifle Association and sign on to a bill that will finally stop this insanity of legalized automatic weapons that exist for one reason and one reason only and that is to kill people.

Seriously. To hell with your meaningless, impotent, feeble prayers. The Great Recipient of those messages consistently appears to give not even the tiniest spotted mouse turd about them, and He obviously could also not care less about stacking ’em up in a Big Prayer Bank to prevent future slaughters. You know what millions of prayers add up to? Nothing. No mass, no weight, no presence. You know what millions of letters/emails add up to? Something. Maybe. There’s a chance they may add up to something. Granted, you’d be sending them to the most stubborn bunch of obstructionist do-nothings, but again, there’s no getting around the fact that a million pieces of impassioned mail is a helluva lot more substantial than a million impassioned prayers.

The three Nevadans in D.C. who are tools doing the bidding of the NRA and voting against any restrictions on the sales of machine guns and automatic weapons are Sen. Dean Heller and Reps. Joe Heck and Mark Amodie. Contact them through their websites at heller.senate.gov., heck.house.gov. and amodei.house.gov. Don’t worry about being polite. Let ’em have it. The time for politeness passed a long fucking time ago.

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American Reality Check—I dare you to watch Michael Moore’s stunning new film, Where to Invade Next. In this one, Moore travels to Italy, France, Finland, Iceland, Portugal, Germany, Slovenia and Tunisia—yes, Tunisia!—and discovers that in major lifestyle sectors (education, health care, employee benefits, women’s equality, drug wars), America is to Europe what monster trucks are to ice skating. Even more interesting/alarming, Moore is reminded that these advanced, progressive policies and realities embraced by modern Europeans were installed courtesy of American ideas that we’ve sacrificed and forgotten in favor of maintaining our ridiculously expensive and soul-sucking bullshit Superpower Empire.

It’s eye-opening. It’s shocking. It’s essential. And will stay with you much longer than any lame-ass comic book flick.