Just another day?
We have been fascinated by the reaction among some talking heads in the media to the fact that president Obama chose not to take Monday off and focus only on the shooting that took place at the Washington D.C. navy yard. After acknowledging that the shooting had taken place and expressing sympathy and grief for those who had died, the president went on to criticize the Republicans in congress for not taking action on several critical issues that confront the nation. The president stated that the looming shutdown of the government and the failure to extend the debt ceiling to allow the government to pay its bills were evidence of a party doing something that has never been done in modern political history--threatening to take the nation over the fiscal cliff just to get 100 percent of what it wants on one specific issue. The president went on to say that it appeared to him as if the Republicans simply want to hurt people for no really good reason.
For the last couple of days, former congressman Joe Scarborough of Florida, speaking from his pulpit on the MSNBC show, Morning Joe, has scolded the president for his actions on Monday afternoon. Scarborough has self appointed himself as the sane voice of the Republican party. It is also no secret that he has higher political ambitions and is using this platform to position himself for higher political office that might even include a run for the presidency. In point of fact, Joe Scarborough fancies himself to be the next Ronald Reagan who will lead his party out of the political wilderness and back into the halls of power in the nation’s capital. So, to say that there was not any political hay to be made with his comments about the president and his presidency would be to ignore the facts completely.
In point of fact, it is the Republicans and their party who have fostered this era of mass shootings with their blind adherence to the National Rifle Association’s mantra that guns have nothing to do with the killing of large numbers of people across this nation on any particular day of the week that some nut chooses to do so. President Obama had carefully set up this speech at the White House to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the collapse of September 2008, which almost took the nation into a depression and he was right to go on ahead and follow through on what he had planned to do. He had brought people to Washington to stand with him when he made the speech and they might not have been able to stay around to wait for another day.
The terrible truth is that the problems facing this nation as we speak are far more important that some nut deciding that a Monday in the city was a good time to knock off a few people to satisfy some confused urge to die a wicked death for whatever was troubling him and take as many with him as he could along the way.
Columnist and pundit Jeff Greenfield, appearing on Morning Joe Tuesday morning, stated that there are simply a certain segment of our population, albeit very small, who are going to take these actions and there is very little that we can do about that fact. The fact that the Congress is not going to buck the NRA and pass some sensible gun control legislation simply provides the fuel to propel these nuts to go on and do what they do. When the president has a major speech prepared on a specific date, to give in to their acts of violence simply enhances what they do. Anyone who would fault this president over an insensitive reaction to gun violence surely has forgotten the New Town, Connecticut school shooting and how he reacted to that.
Although this shooting occurred in the morning, it reminds us of the old film “Dog Day Afternoon” in which Al Pacino stars as a trapped criminal performing for the crowd as the world marches on around him. In point of fact, these shooting are becoming so common that the world is simply shrugging its shoulders and moving on about its business as they occur. We are sorry for the twelve people who lost their lives that day but can anyone other than the grieving relatives name any one of their names as they are already lost to us amid the wash of the history of these shootings that occur each and every year that we live. What is remarkable now are things such as the school secretary down in Georgia who recently talked a shooter out of carrying out his plan that would have created another New Town in the southern part of the nation.
The names pile up: Aurora, New Town, Washington D.C., Columbine, Virginia Tech, and a host of others where the innocent and the innocence of the nation has and is slowly draining away in a constant stream of blood from the weapons of these pathetic people who see some glory in having their lives taken as they spill the blood of others who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Men, women, children, it just doesn’t matter any longer as these silent killers who are always described as emotionless in their actions, continue to blaze away at the nations consciousness until it seems to appear that the nation simply doesn’t have one any longer.
The bigger sin might have been if Barack Obama had cancelled his speech and let this latest killer win by disrupting the nation’s agenda. After all, budgets and the credit worthiness of the country are important and continuing problems that, over the long run, are far more important than the deaths of twelve souls in Washington D.C. And they loom large over the national landscape right now and they just simply cannot wait. Barack Obama knows that just as well as anyone.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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