Sorting out complex thoughts on the horrifying recent gun violence.
Robert Kuttner has a great
blog on HuffPost, here's my favorite excerpt:
After the Virginia Tech massacre, my friend Drew Westen proposed the following commercial, to be spoken by a rural Democratic elected official, such as a Jim Webb or a Jon Tester:
The speaker is holding an AK-47 in one hand and a hunting rifle in the other. He looks directly into the camera and says:
This is a hunting rifle. I've had one since I was a teenager. Every law-abiding American has a right to one of these.
This is an assault weapon. It's used to kill people. If you want to use one of those, you should volunteer and join the armed services. If you think it should be used on deer, you shouldn't have one.
Any questions?
My personal thoughts go to how society deals with people with psychological problems. There is often focus on institutionalizing them, and/or jailing them.
Working with children and adults with disabilities, it's been shown that giving people pets like a dog can make a big difference.
What about community garden programs? Time spent with animals or gardening has worked wonders for ex-convicts, disturbed military veterans and others.
This is a relevant topic for the Rumsfeld Invaders blog. The concept behind the creation of Rumsfeld Invaders was a video game that could make politics appealing to young men who were obssessed with video games. Instead of wasting countless hours playing mindless violent video games, let's wake up to the real world around us, and get involved in something real that has real implications on people's quality of life. Although Space Invaders is a simplistic "shooter" video game, my perception is that most kids these days who play the 3D first person stuff would laugh at it. You know, Atari 2600, "8-bit", "not violent enough". That's OK, it's a spoof, and the goal is to get people who would otherwise be turned off by politics (young people) to check it out, learn something, and then change their ways. I think too much violent video games is bad for the individuals playing them, and for society because those people could be productive and help society fix its problems instead of being cooped up indoors shooting things.
President Obama brought up some big questions in his speech in Newtown CT, "Why are we here?" "What is our first task? and how do we know if we're succeeding?" (not exact quotes but you know what I mean). Those questions can lead to answers of sustainability and caring community.
Lakoff said it well at HuffPost too:
Democracy, as the president has said, begins with the people taking care of one another responsibly, importantly through government as an instrument of freedom. That how we get our public schools, our roads, our sewers, our patent office, our scientific research, our energy, communication and transportation systems, our food safety, our protectors, and all the rest that we need to be free in our private lives. It is a truth: the private depends on the public. We, all together, constitute the public.
Lakoff finishes by saying, "The president set just the right tone.
We're in this together." (I added the link, pretty sweet.)
On another subject, an
alpha female wolf was killed outside Yellowstone.
Terrible. A good idea to avoid such future tragedies is for the Department of Interior to distribute tranquilizer guns to all the ranchers around Yellowstone for free with the phone number to call, and the DOI will come pick up the tranquilized wolves and take them back to the park. This is a better idea than my first reaction when I heard the news...
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