Feel the epiphanous relationship of the disaster in The Sudan with Kaylin Gillis and Ralph Yarl.

It’s called destruction. It emerges from hate, love or some other intense emotion. Amplified by modern technology it grows exponentially, quickly fuses into cultural movements and governments like a Covid virus strangling our pulmonary cells. And then – always – it explodes into war.

In The Sudan the destruction wastes a beautiful, ancient land killing thousands with bullets, shrapnel and starvation. The Sudan has struggled with pharaohs, deserts and disease for 5000 years and finally moved towards amazing social transformation just a few years ago on the shoulders of courageous, ingenuous women. Now, it’s almost destroyed.

In New Jersey Ralph Yarl was an up-and-coming musical progeny, a 16-year old black kid who’s mother asked him to pick up his younger twin brothers at an address on 151st Street. Poor Ralph accidentally knocked on the door at 151st Terrace. He was shot twice.

Twenty-year-old Kaylin Gillis was probably a little bit giddy and incautious riding with a bunch of friends searching for a party house in rural Missouri when they turned up a driveway and started to turn around when gunfire pelted the car, randomly killing her.

It’s all the same. It’s so powerful and so complicated I just can’t get my head around it.

In The Sudan it’s partly tribal, partly greed and 100% desperation. Each side knows the winner of the conflict will erase the other, and the other’s families and pets and histories. It’s them or us and compromise is suicide.

The men attacking Ralph and Kaylin said they were “scared.” Of what? A diminutive, well-dressed little black boy? An unarmed, unknown recently unteenager looking for a party? No, they were afraid of being wiped out themselves, because that’s what Fox News has headlined: crime is rampant. They’re coming for you.

And probably more correctly, they lack intellectual self-restraint, the ability to achieve due diligence over what they perceive as a problematic situation. They react instead of reflect. That’s not their fault. It’s the fault of the 20th century culture in America that decided to fund public education with property taxes. Did you notice the locales and neighborhoods where these incidents occurred? In many respects, not much different from central Khartoum.

But there is one thing I can understand:

That last step is the explosion into war, which is the effective destruction. Let there be hate. Let there be racism. Let there be stupidity. If there weren’t guns, in the vast majority of cases there wouldn’t be death
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Now even that’s daunting, because weapons isn’t just something found in the grip of early man, it’s essentially a biological technique of survival. So I’m not for a minute suggesting the solution to our wanton destruction is getting rid of guns.

But if the destruction is proportional to the number of guns, then we can at least slow it down, buy ourselves some time to figure out the next step in our losing battle for survival.

We can get rid of some of the guns.

There are more guns, bazookas, nuclear bombs, firecrackers in the United States than in the rest of the world combined. In fact in the rest of the world most of guns, bazookas, nuclear bombs (but not firecrackers) are made in Washington and Virginia.

Sudan doesn’t make weapons. It tried, but Clinton bombed its only factory in 2000. So where did all those weapons come from that are destroying in a few days 5000 years of much of mankind’s most important and fascinating history?

Often Israel, a notorious weapons broker. Maybe the Ukraine, where so many weapons are going right now that there’s no way they can be satisfactorily tracked. Maybe Iran, that loves to sow chaos among the infidels. Maybe Panama – read John Le Carre.

But where were those weapons made?

Mostly in the United States. 40% to be precise. 2½ times the next biggest manufacturer, Russia.

And where did the gun that put a bullet into the head of 16-year old kid who accidentally knocked on the wrong door come from? Where was the weapon made that killed Kaylin Gillis for accidentally pulling into the wrong driveway?

Obviously, you know. They’re made here. They’re sold here. They’re traded here and they’re protected here by crazies masquerading as politicians winning elections bought by the NRA.

Why so many Americans have become so enraged that they act so irrationally is depressingly complicated. Truly, I mean, I’ve tried to understand and think I’m on my way to, but it’s just not simple. It’s horribly, horribly complicated.

But the beginning of a solution to facilitating that rage into destruction is to limit weapons. That doesn’t take a rocket scientist to explain. Fewer booms, fewer deaths.

It doesn’t mean less rage or hate. That’s a much harder nut to crack. That will take a lot more time than limiting weapons.

But the human race seems to be in a mode of increasing self-destruction. We’ve got to dig deep into our biology, our evolution, and figure out the simple paths to survival. All of those simple paths prevent murder, social suicide.

Have we gone so far off the edge that can’t be understood?