One more
time—this time, the worse ever, the American public must live through another
incident of senseless violence, committed with a military-style assault rifle;
because people elected to office, by voters who overwhelmingly oppose the sale
of these weapons of mass destruction, are so completely beholden to the gun
lobby that they will not act in the public’s interest—no matter the tragedy,
the pain and terror that results.
One has to wonder
if our republic is broken, if such an egregious thing cannot be stopped despite
the will of the people. The problem is not exclusively with one political
party. Members of both major parties are stricken with a lack of
responsiveness, a cowardice that they seem unable or unwilling to overcome.
How long will
voters be distracted by the fake arguments: that the 2nd Amendment to the U. S.
Constitution stymies any pertinent action; and despite the Oklahoma City
bombing, the mass shootings in the Aurora, Colorado movie theatre, the massacre
at Virginia Tech, the killings at the Sandy Hook School, and the assassinations
at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, demagogues insist on blaming
foreigners alone for our troubles. One need only search the web at “mass
shootings in USA” to see we would suffer this sickness even if there were no
foreign enemies. Acts of domestic terrorism having nothing to do with radical
Islam stand out as the overwhelming cause of deaths by mass violence.
So the people
must be smart and know that addressing the challenge ought lead to outlawing
the instruments of death, not to stirring religious and racial bigotry in the
midst of our grief, fear and confusion, as one presidential candidate was quick
to do. By now, it must be understood by all that, foreign-inspired,
religious bigotry is only one of the seeds of the hatefulness and violence we
face, as leaders of Planned Parenthood Clinics can surely attest.
The gullibility
to false and distracting claims must stop deterring citizen action. Every
incumbent, public official must be put on notice that the position they occupy
is in jeopardy if they fail to act. Gullibility is fertile soil for the
Neo-Fascist climate that is growing in the nation, where we see a perilous
willingness by people to surrender their power to unexamined claims and
over-simplified solutions to the rapidly changing social, cultural and economic
landscape.
If these simple
answers appear too good to be true, it is because they are.
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