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like most everyone else who was paying attention to the news on saturday morning, i was shocked, then devastated, then angry as the events rolled out in Arizona. i am not going to get too political about this, outside of saying that, like heavy metal doesn’t cause suicide and rap music doesn’t cause gang violence, while i know there is not a direct cause—>effect correlation between use of imagry and language regarding guns/hunting to refer to “taking out” your political enemies, it still makes me angry that there is so much denial about any COLLECTIVE cultural responsibility and taking back/revisionist history going on with Palin et.al. but, i agree that pointing fingers in this case gets us nowhere and only inflames the political situation when there are larger, more definite problems that lead to this unfortunate tragedy.
in the end, i agree most that more than whatever part the inciteful language may have had, the real cause of the problem here was lack of mental health care for the assailant. Giffords’ support for the right to bear arms (and buy weapons and ammo at wal-mart and sporting goods stores) is tragic irony enough, but the larger fact that that the reason Giffords was put “on the map” with crosshairs over her district to begin with was because she voted for the public health care option should be the real focus here. had Loughner had access to mental health care, had his family had better access to support, this might never have happened.
congress – are you still working to repeal “Obamacare” ASAP? maybe you should rethink that. for the health and safety of us all.
Filed in politics and news | Tagged with obama, palin, public option | Comment (0)Leave a Reply
