Monday, October 2, 2017

Las Vegas Massacre

                The shocking and sickening massacre at Las Vegas’ Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino late Sunday night was, almost inconceivably, made yet more appalling, disturbing, depressing, and sinister by the reactions of some politicians and media types.
                After hearing that nearly 600 people were killed or injured in the slaughter, making this the worst mass shooting in American history, a top lawyer for the CBS broadcast television network promptly took to Facebook to announce: “If they wouldn’t do anything when children were murdered I have no hope that Repugs will ever do the right thing. I’m actually not even sympathetic bc country music fans often are Republican gun toters.”
                Talk about “hate speech!” She’s actually signing off on the random shooting of hundreds of innocent souls- men, women, and children, because she doesn’t like what she assumes to be their views on a political issue! Generalizing a bit, aren’t we? And where’s that famous leftist tolerance empathy, and inclusiveness. This is beyond appalling.
                “Comedian” Megan Amram responded to an article observing that the gunman who conducted the attacks doesn’t fit the typical mass shooter profile by tweeting: “White man? Sure does,” a comment that was “favorited” over 5,000 times in the first three hours after it was posted. This is demonstrably false. You can be sure she never tweeted about the race or ethnicity of the many, many radical Islamists after any of their terror attacks. For good measure, she then added a pair of “jokes” related to the disaster, stating, “Trump, please ban Americans from traveling to the United States. They are far too dangerous to let in,” and “Today was the day Donald trump finally became president.”
                As if she was somehow not sufficiently repulsive already, Hillary Clinton immediately used the mass-murder to lobby for more gun-control. She was, predictably, joined by numerous Democrat Congressmen. Steeped in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, Democrats never let a crisis or disaster go to waste when they think they can make political hay out of it.
                Conservatives rarely- if ever- do the same. Remember all those Republicans and conservative commentators saying things like, “It was just a gay bar, doesn’t bother me all that much” after the mass shootings at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando last year. Me neither. There is a good reason for that…they don’t happen. Anyone whose first thought after a tragedy like this…is to attempt to use it for their political gain is a soul-deadened monster. Especially when not all the facts are known, nor loved ones notified. This type of callous rhetoric and dogma, this intolerant and insensitive politically-correct group-think is helping to sow division and tear the country apart.
                Moreover, for far too long our “leaders” have been concocting policies and enacting laws that lead to  urban hopeless and entitlement, that divide us by race, class, gender, and almost anything else one can think of, and by making possible the nearly total abdication of personal responsibility. The Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments have been evicted from public life, while Christianity is actively mocked on television and in the movies. The elite establishment in academia, the media, entertainment, and the Democratic Party, all regularly go out of their way to tell us that the country that brought the world the Declaration of Independence, the “melting pot,” and the Marshall Plan has never been anything but a white, patriarchal, wet-dream.
                And now we’re tearing down our own historical monuments and taking a knee for the National Anthem. When a society does not know its past, it has no future. What are people left to believe in? What traditions, observances, and rites now bind us together? This sowing of distrust, disdain and division is a recipe for individual despair, anger, and mental illness, and therefore, ultimately, for societal dissolution and disaster.
                 This must be a time to stand together, not sit apart. The only time we should be taking a knee is in prayer. If we do this, maybe someday we will progress to the point where we can once again openly say, “All Lives Matter.”

                Even those of (possibly) Republican country music lovers.

                That would be a fitting memorial to those we’ve lost.


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