The shooting in Arizona has been all over the news, as it rightly should be. I’m not going into the details, but like everything else, I have thoughts on it I’d like to share.
The mainstream media and Washington DC are completely missing the point, to nobody’s surprise. This is about the victims and their families. We can’t lose sight of that. The victims and their families would hope that something good can come from their pain.
I’d like to see the nation realize that our political process is dysfunctional. We demonize those who disagree with us. There was rabid anger from the liberals during George W. Bush’s presidency and there’s now rabid anger from the conservatives during Barack Obama’s presidency. It’s truly toxic stuff and it creates a raging atmosphere. I’ve seen signs comparing both Bush and Obama to Hitler. That’s uncalled for and counterproductive.
The way I see it, the question isn’t, “Can I say something?” The answer is very often yes, you can say it. To suggest otherwise is an attack on the 1st amendment. The question instead is, “Should I say something?” This was part of the point of the Rally to Restore Sanity I attended last year.
In my experience, if you’re trying to get someone to agree with you and that person doesn’t already agree with you, insulting them will not help your cause. It will make the person dig in more and probably not like you too much, either. On the other hand, it’s much more effective to present a logical argument that strengthens your points and weakens theirs while suppressing the desire to call the other person a [insert insult here].
I think it’s possible that something good will come out of this, but right now the media and politicians aren’t helping.
The liberal networks are blaming the conservatives, mainly Sarah Palin. Fairly or not, the liberal media can’t resist an opportunity to attack Palin, so they trotted out Palin’s map with the crosshairs and said that is enough to make Palin responsible. This is pure nonsense. Palin is not the only person to use gun rhetoric in political discourse. In Palin’s defense, the conservative media quickly points out Barack Obama saying, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and this makes me think blaming Palin is way off-base.
That said, Palin’s defense was as nonsensical as the accusation. Her people claimed the symbols on the map were surveyor symbols instead of crosshairs, which is pretty laughable. But, wait, there’s more. Palin also mentioned the term ‘blood libel’ in her statements, and this was not a prudent thing to say. For those unfamiliar with the term, blood libel refers to the accusation, starting in medieval Europe, that Jewish people would take the blood of Christian children. These accusations were quite often baseless and many innocent Jewish people were murdered as a result. Think of it like an earlier version of the Salem witch hunts in colonial America. I’m not Jewish, but I couldn’t blame any Jewish people for being a bit irked by such a ridiculous comparison.
The main point is both the liberal and conservative media have allowed this to be about Sarah Palin instead of the victims. As I said above, the politicians are equally clueless. They have a bad mentality here. First, they don’t ever want to let any crisis go to waste. Second, they think legislation can solve every problem. Third, they tend to fight the last war. Here are a couple examples.
The 1st amendment is under attack from Representative Bob Brady (D, PA), who wants to outlaw the use of certain imagery when describing politicians and judges. So, would the government read everything on the internet all day, every day? And how arbitrary would the standards be for determining legality of speech? It’s a bad bill, plain and simple.
Don’t worry, 2nd amendment fans. It’s under attack, too. Representative Peter King (R, NY) is calling for a law to make it illegal to have a gun within 1,000 feet of a politician. Again, how would that be enforced? Everybody would have to know at all times where every politician is so they wouldn’t violate the 1,000 feet on the way to the shooting range. Broadcasting such information to the world is foolishness. Al Qaeda would love it. This is another bad bill.
The American people know what really matters here, and I hope the media and politicians realize it, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment