Since my original idea for this blog was to post about spirituality and politics, I would be amiss not to comment on the recent shooting down in Tuscon.
First, let me just say that this is a horrifying tragedy.
Second, my sincere apology. I've told people that the way to deal with radicals in politics would just be to shoot them before they ran for the presidency. It was my frustrated response to the insurmountable partisanship in American politics. It was wrong, regardless of the reason, for me to say something like that. Again, I apologize.
There is a lot of room for apology in American politics right now. All of the articles that I've read, all the videos I've watched, the authors have said that all of us need to own up to how we contributed to the shooting in Arizona. Yet, when you read the comments following the articles, almost every commentator is focused on blaming one side or the other, instead of owning up to the universal wrongness in our society that led up to the murder of six people, serious injuries to 14 people, and the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords.
That's where we are, folks. Not on the eve of a national revolution to rid ourselves of oppressive dictators, but dans de la merde, a nation that has gone totally lu-lu. All the legitimate politicians are exiting the scene via death or retirement and what we are left with are a bunch of whack-jobs who won't balance the nation's checkbook, on the take from corporations, and full of hateful rhetoric that stirs up all the other whack-jobs that are listening. Who cares what I say in the political arena as long as it gets me on TV or lands me a book deal? Right?
Wrong. That is a perversion of politics. American politics isn't supposed to be about personal gain or pushing your personal social agenda. It's supposed to be about performing a patriotic service by representing your fellow man. Few people in my generation were taught about having manners in public, much less about good citizenship. How do you expect them to be any kind of decent politician?
Since the shooting, some folks have jumped on the "watch what you say" bandwagon. While that sentiment sounds fine, it's a little too ambiguous and Big Brother to me. Watch what I say? My answer is "Back off, bitch." Why? In my experience, people that say things like that are generally not in the habit of using their freedom of speech. When the only people they talk to are their friends and family (not even their neighbors anymore!), freedom of speech, by and large, goes to the wayside. Don't talk about politics. Don't talk about religion. Don't talk about race. Don't talk about sex. Don't talk about money. (Holy crap. What DO you talk about???) So, telling someone else not to exercise their freedom of speech goes hand in hand with their own failure to take advantage of it. They have little or no connection to freedom of speech because they don't engage in it, therefore lack appreciation of it. If it was taken away, they wouldn't even notice.
Not in my family. Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, politics, business, religion, ... there isn't a topic we don't touch in a single evening. And it doesn't change in public. So, yes, I'm sensitive about someone saying, in essence, to shut up. If you don't participate in public discussion, you have no business suggesting to someone that they "watch what they say".
How about I offer this, instead: "Certain topics require thoughtful consideration before speaking." See? Reasonable. Civilized. Inoffensive. Responsible. And guess what else? A perfect political statement in a nation gone crazy.
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I agree with you. Only the Brown Shirts are feeling defensive.
ReplyDeleteWhat disturbs me more than the shooting is the debate that followed: should our ex-vice presidential hopeful be blamed in part, for a massacre? Did The Quitter’s words incite violence?
What little we know about Jared Loughner indicates he was insanely obsessed with grammar as a tool of mind control, with punctuation as the antidote. I don't think NLP has anything to do with the conspiracy theories he was following. That's your area of expertise (See link http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/01/sovereign-citizens-jared-lee-loughner.)
Beyond his obsession with bad grammar, we’re told he was scary and argumentative. He was a dropout who did a lot of deep reading. Like most paranoid schizophrenics, he took a literal interpretation of whatever he read. The part of his brain that engages in critical thinking and synthesis is broken.
His intention to reload is the metaphor that will not die.
Palin drives me crazy with her inability to string a sentence together, but she doesn’t have Medusa-like powers. I’m argumentative too, but I refuse to read anything that defends Sarah and the vanity campaigners like her, the ones who pretend to read and understand the Constitution. You can’t bring truth to power if you haven’t even cracked the Cliff Notes.
Palin is a liar and a narcissist. Pot, meet crow bar.
When Palin lied about her map of political targets, saying the cross hairs were surveyor’s marks, her career should have died on the spot. Instead, we're still talking about her. I'm doing it right now!
Enough. Debased currency indeed. (See sovereigns, gold standard as treason, subjects that can’t be owned by one constituency.)
The real story: Jared Loughner has an undiagnosed and/or untreated mental illness. He lives in one of the worst states in the U.S. for access to treatment for mental illness. Gabrielle Giffords is a Blue Dog Democrat. She’s a conservative Dem in the only liberal pocket in Arizona. To her Tea Party foes, that makes her Emma Goldman.
Unlike most of her congressional peers, she’s in-tune with her constituents. She listens to them. That’s why she was standing in front of a grocery store instead of chasing whores and cocktails with lobbyists. (That's Boehner's MO.) Unlike most of her conservative Dem peers, she voted for health insurance reform, and for that, Palin wanted her dead politically.
Loughner hit the wrong target. Isn’t that what Palin wanted?