This blog is about horseracing. It’s a sport, a hobby, a distraction from the real world, But there are times when the real world is overwhelming. So much of America is angry. The rise of political outsiders like Donald Trump and Ben Carson underscores that fact, as does the speech from those on the left and right poles of the political spectrum. Excess in criticism has become so commonplace, we no longer see a line between civil discourse and vulgarity. The ability to disagree, to engage in reasonable intellectual debate, becomes less and less possible as those with differing opinions simply see their opposite as somewhere between misguided and outright stupid. Your opponent just doesn’t have a different point of view – he is wrong, evil, incompetent, and a moron.

It is more complicated because at the same time Americans are fearful. They fear attacks from without by groups like ISIS, and they fear attacks from within by everyone from the delusionally insane James Holmes shooting up a movie theater in Aurora (my current place of residence), to the alienated rageaholic shooter Robert Dear, who last week unloaded his semi-automatic rifle inside a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs, to the latest mass killing in San Bernardino by Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik, disaffected by something the authorities have not yet determined, but committed enough to their cause to forfeit their lives and leave a six month old child forever parentless.

There is no answer to the randomness of the violence. It has not been stopped by what must have been the billions of prayers offered by those who believe in the power of prayer. It has not been stopped by the platitudes and rhetoric of the political class. It hasn’t been stopped by laws aimed at arming more people, or laws limiting certain types of weapons, like the law in California making automatic weapons with high capacity clips illegal, which had no effect on the killers there. But inaction based on the excuse that those who would do us harm will always find a way regardless of our laws is cowardice. It is not our way as humans or Americans to believe there is any unsolveable problem. There is only an unwillingness to do what is necessary to solve a problem.

If there is an answer it is to agree that the issue cannot be driven by the fears of groups like the NRA that even the smallest limitation on gun ownership is the first step on the road to becoming Australia, nor can it be driven by the people who believe the only answer is the elimination of private ownership of firearms. The issue must be driven by those who believe responsible gun ownership by responsible people is reasonable, but that the irresponsible or the deranged or those driven by perverse ideology must be denied access to weapons. There must be a recognition that certain classes of weapons are simply too dangerous to be in the hands of anyone other than those authorized by law to keep us safe, but that banning public ownership of such weapons does not have to lead to banning of personal protection and hunting firearms. It must be based on the kind of research that has been disallowed by those who fear what that research might reveal. The idea that research must be suppressed is anathema to those who believe in the power of rational and informed thought to solve problems. If we do not get the information we need to make good decisions, then we will continue to react with meaningless anger and answers based on nothing more than the direction from which the anger originates. The danger in searching for answers is that we may not like the answers we get, but we must have faith that rational people working together with good information and good intentions have all the armament they need to find the right solutions. We must demand that those who have been elected to set the plate for solving those problems do their job or get the hell out of the way.

There are days when horseracing cannot distract me from the world. And more and more often that happens. It is impossible to hide from the beheadings, mass killings – the anger and the fear. But we are sentenced to having that world assault our senses and sensibility as long as the anger and fear keep us from doing those things that we must do to say we are doing enough.

It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means.     Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now