Skip to main content

Where are the grown-ups?

Have we gone completely mad?

It is completely legal for people who have a permit to carry
either a concealed or an open weapon to attend a Presidential rally.
And they are doing just that! We shoot Presidents in this country!

Idiots--idiots!--are chanting slogans such as a line from Thomas Jefferson,
that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood
of patriots and tyrants," and carrying loaded weapons to where
the President is addressing a crowd. The clearly-intended inference
is that the President is a tyrant. The same lame-brains--No, that is
too kind--the same idiots call the President a Nazi or a Communist.

How can a civilized nation sit on its hands, thumbs up,
and not be outraged at what we have come to? Of course
those people have a legal right to carry, not just handguns,
but rifles and shotguns in public places, because we passed laws
that allow them to. We have pretended that allowing people
to carry concealed or open weaponry makes us safer!

Somewhere in Congress there has to be a grown-up who will stand up
and say, right out loud, that we have gone mad! This is not about
the right to bear arms, the right to go hunting, or the right to self-defense.
This is about what we need to do to prevent someone during a
shouting match, as our Republican friends have openly promoted,
from doing what they are shouting about. Calling the President
a Nazi or a Communist might be withing the bounds of free speech,
however uninformed and utterly stupid it is, but allowing that same
gathering to come armed to the demonstration is pure madness.

Can we pretend that racism has been put behind us? Of course not!
Unbearable numbers of people making mindless protests against
a better health care program are not primarily concerned about
health care. They are scared in ways they do not want to talk about,
by having a Black man as a President, by their stupid belief that he
is a Muslim (or as one woman said, 'an Arab"), by the appointment
of an Hispanic woman to the Supreme Court, but the growing numbers
of non-Caucasian people who are our citizens, by what has happened
to our economy, by their own crumbling economic well-being, and
by people who speak English almost as well as they do, and who
speak other languages, as well. they are scared, and some of them
are armed, and they are shouting slogans. They are dangerous.

Any sensible person, even one who thinks that a lot of people
should have the right to carry a weapon, has to understand
that what is going on is life-threatening, and a threat to a civil society.

The Mall of America in Minneapolis, and many other establishments
have the right to exclude weaponry on their premises, but we allow
people frothing at the mouth to pack heat to a Presidential rally!

Where are the grown-ups?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there