All those years I watched Westerns, I never once wanted to go back and live by the law of the fastest gun. Even if every one of us carried a concealed weapon, we would still be at a huge disadvantage if someone else pulled their gun first. Does anyone seriously want to walk through a shopping mall with weapons drawn, straining to pick out who might be a threat?
The mother killed in the Newtown massacre had surrounded herself with guns she thought would protect her. The only detail she left out of her fortified life was the unpredictability of human nature. She was shot by her own son using one of the guns she had bought to keep her safe.
I understand that many sane people want weapons for sporting and for defensive purposes. But there is no moral purpose served by military grade automatic weapons that counterbalances their danger to us all. Granting the right we all have to self defense, the more weapons we pile up beyond that need, the less safe our world becomes.
The following statistics are a condensed version of the article linked below:
In 2011, guns were used to murder 8,583 people living in the U.S., according to the most recent FBI data available. Among those murdered by guns, there were 565 young people under the age of 18, and 119 children ages 12 or younger — the latter number nearly equivalent to six Newtown mass shootings. And these figures include only homicides.
Then there are the stories of children killed in gun accidents and suicides. In 2010, the most recent year for which detailed Centers for Disease Control data is available, 129 people between the ages of 1 and 19 died in gun accidents. Another 749 took their own lives using a firearm, most of which were owned by a parent.
…The number of children and teens killed in 2008 and 2009 in the U.S. alone could fill 229 classroom with 25 students, according to a report released by the Fund report.
Every year our nation adds to the avalanche of guns, prisons and wars against terror. We have filled the skies with spy satellites and killer drones. Will our horrified spasm against every possible threat make us safe? Go to a museum sometime and study the dinosaurs. They had the most powerful biological defenses of all time. They were invincible in one sense, but in a more important sense, their impregnable defenses became maladaptive to their own survival. Are they a fossilized version of ourselves?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/child-gun-deaths-newtown_n_2347920.html
Oh, the irony! The President who rose to power using an English version of a migrant workers’ chant (“Yes, we can!”) has broken his own previous record at arresting and deporting those same immigrants.
The agency deported 409,849 immigrants in the 2012 fiscal year, up from 396,906 immigrants last year. More than 392,000 immigrants were deported in the 2010 fiscal year. -Huffington Post
The administration also announced that it will focus more on aliens with a criminal record and less on law abiding workers without documentation.
“While the [fiscal year] 2012 removals indicate that we continue to make progress in focusing resources on criminal and priority aliens, with more convicted criminals being removed from the country than ever before, we are constantly looking for ways to ensure that we are doing everything we can to utilize our resources in a way that maximizes public safety,” ICE Director John Morton said in a statement.
The White House has said it will focus more on arresting primarily non citizens with criminal records, on tweaking the “Secure Communities” program that has sent so many noncriminal immigrants to incarceration, and on granting legal status to 11 million workers without documentation. But while the administration is promising reform, it is also setting land speed records going in the opposite direction.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/immigration-deportation_n_2348090.html
The Pope took time from his Christmas message of peace to make sure that gay and lesbian Catholics feel like crap this holiday.
“People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given to them by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being, they deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves.”
“The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s (sic) fundamental choice where he (sic) himself (sic) is concerned.”
Whenever a Pope uses the word “nature,” he is not, of course, referring to nature as revealed by the scientific method. By “nature” a Pope refers to “natural law” as revealed to St. Aquinas from his study of scripture and Aristotle, not necessarily in that order. Like his twitter account, this Pope uses science not as a fearless pursuit of whatever is true, but as supermarket from which to pick and choose those discoveries which are convenient to the medieval mind.
This Pope came to power as the church’s watchdog when it comes to all matters sexual, whether it was keeping women in their place, preventing the poor from obtaining birth control or dehumanizing homosexual persons. So this Christmas, when many Catholics will be focused on a star shining over Bethlehem, this Pope is keeping his focus where it has always been -on the human groin.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/21/pope-anti-gay-speech_n_2344870.html
The first Christmas was shared with foreign religious scholars, animals and even an unwed couple. The entire holiday was a hope for all people. The Christian Church cannot copyright that message and limit it to ourselves. The message of Christmas has nothing to do with capitalism, American pride, or Christian exclusivism for that matter. The message of Christmas is heard in the angels’ song, “Peace on earth, Good will to all!”* Any who try to restrict that message to their own group are the true assassins of Christmas.
(*I am aware that the full scriptural quote is “Peace on earth, good will to all with whom God is pleased.” I am quoting the hymn here. No need to send comments that I am twisting scripture and that God means your own group and not mine. Rest your weary fingers, my friend, and hear what the angels are singing to us all.)
FOX News has a hallowed place in journalism. After all, every aquarium needs a bottom feeder. In its annual assault on our non-Christian neighbors, FOX has featured many interviews aiming to convince Christians that Jews, Muslims and non-theists who don’t want to pay taxes to have the snow of our white Christmas blown in their face, are attacking us.
This interview is particularly revealing. A store Santa shares his personal pain at the move toward greater inclusivity at the holiday time. Jesus is not mentioned once, which tells us that the “Christmas” being protected is actually the cultural and consumer based mostrosity that has been built over the grave of the original Christmas.
The first Christmas was shared with foreign religious scholars, animals and even an unwed couple. The entire holiday was a hope for all people. The Christian church cannot copyright that message and limit it to ourselves. The message of Christmas has nothing to do with capitalism, American pride, or Christian exclusivism for that matter. The message of Christmas is heard in the angels song, “Peace on earth, Good will to all!” Any who try to restrict that message to their own group are the true assassins of Christmas.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/20/fox-news-santa-war-on-christmas_n_2338112.html
The New York Times reports this morning that end of the world prophecies have unleashed strange behaviors at schools. Rumors of violence and school shootings have shut down several schools altogether. Matt Wandrie, a superintendent in the Detroit area, responded:
“It was like ‘my niece’s neighbor’s daughter says there’s going to be gun violence at school on Friday,’ ” he said — and added that students were overheard in the hallways saying things like “Let’s go out with a bang on Friday.”
“If you’ve got students who are disenfranchised or unstable or members of a community who really believe this end of the world stuff,” he said, “whether I think it’s credible or not, as a fairly logical person and human being, I’m not going to take that risk.”
All of this destructive behavior raises a larger question: What does belief that the world is about to end do to those who hold that belief? If children grow restless and nihilistic in an apocalyptic atmosphere, perhaps adults who worship in apocalyptic religions are nearer to destructive behavior than those in more peaceful views of the world.
There were those in the Reagan administration who famously scoffed at environmental efforts because they believed the world was to end. The President of France was deeply shaken when, in private conversation about the Iraq invasion, President Bush began to ramble about the Gog and Magog of Revelation. Why work for lasting peace or save the environment if the world is about to end anyway? Why not go out with a bang?
Perhaps that dead end thinking is why so many cult leaders, wanting to trigger irrational and violent behavior in their followers, teach that the world is about to end. Perhaps that is why the rest of us should renounce nihilistic worldviews as well. Jesus once said, “judge the tree by its fruit.” Perhaps Christians should spend less time trying to understand the second coming and more time understanding the first.
The NY Times article quoted above is linked here. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/21/education/doomsday-prophecy-prompts-rumors-of-violence-in-schools.html?_r=0
“In the US, mass child killings are tragedies. In Pakistan, mere bug splats”. -George Monbiot, The Guardian
The massacre at Newtown Connecticut has deeply affected our nation. While we are still in touch with tears for our own children, perhaps it will be possible for Amerians to find a tear for the children of other nations as well. Glenn Greenwald has written a powerful article (linked below) from which I am borrowing quotes.
Greenwald quotes George Montiot saying, after listening to Obama’s speech on Newtown:
“Most of the world’s media, which has rightly commemorated the children of Newtown, either ignores Obama’s murders or accepts the official version that all those killed are ‘militants’. The children of north-west Pakistan, it seems, are not like our children. They have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and flowers and teddy bears. They belong to the other: to the non-human world of bugs and grass and tissue.
“‘Are we,’ Obama asked on Sunday, ‘prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?’ It’s a valid question. He should apply it to the violence he is visiting on the children of Pakistan.”
Political philosophy professor Falguni Sheth is quoted as saying the shooting in Newtown is an expression of a culture that has killed 178 by drones:
“And let there be no mistake: many of ‘us’ have directly felt the impact of that culture: Which ‘us’? Yemeni parents, Pakistani uncles and aunts, Afghan grandparents and cousins, Somali brothers and sisters, Filipino cousins have experienced the impact of the culture of killing children. Families of children who live in countries that are routinely droned by the US [government]. Families of children whose villages are raided nightly in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
A Yemeni blogger appealed to Obama:
“Our children’s blood is not cheaper than American blood and the pain of loosing [sic] them is just as devastating. Our children matter too, Mr. President! These tragedies ‘also’ must end and to end them ‘YOU’ must change!”
Greenwald concludes:
Every war – particularly protracted ones like the “War on Terror” – demands sustained dehumanization campaigns against the targets of the violence. Few populations will tolerate continuous killings if they have to confront the humanity of those who are being killed. The humanity of the victims must be hidden and denied. That’s the only way this constant extinguishing of life by their government can be justified or at least ignored. That was the key point made in the extraordinarily brave speech given by then-MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield in 2003 after she returned from Iraq, before she was demoted and then fired: that US media coverage of US violence is designed to conceal the identity and fate of its victims.
Citizens of a militaristic empire are inexorably trained to adopt the mentality of their armies: just listen to Good Progressive Obama defenders swagger around like they’re decorated, cigar-chomping combat veterans spouting phrases like “war is hell” and “collateral damage” to justify all of this. That is the anti-Muslim dehumanization campaign rearing its toxic head.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/19/newtown-drones-children-deaths
Five Media Myths About Welfare
“Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” -A.J. Liebling
Not surprisingly, the media assumes certain narratives that tend to favor their corporate owners. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) is a site that covers how the media spins the news. Clearly the people who own the news sources would prefer that we ask certain questions, and avoid others. The link below leads to the full article, but I will list the five “myths” as listen by FAIR and give my own shorter explanation.
1. Poor women have more children because of the “financial incentives” of welfare benefits.
Some media pundits love to villify welfare mothers. They paint women on welfare as having multiple babies just to receive benefits instead of working. But the average birthrate of welfare families is about the same as average. And the benefits in question add up to $90 per child.
2. We don’t subsidize middle-class families.
Middle class families do receive a subsidy in the form of a $2,450 tax deduction.
3. The public is fed up with spending money on the poor.
Poll results depend on how the question is asked. Anti-welfare crusaders have been successful in paining “welfare” as a bad word, but 80% of those asked said the government has a responsibility to try to do a way with poverty.
4. We’ve spent over $5 trillion on welfare since the ’60s and it hasn’t worked.
The $5 trillion figure is based on the questionable method of adding Medicaid, food stamps, food lunches and scholarship programs together. Actual aid to dependent families was less than $500 billion or 1.5% of the budget. The program has not singlehandedly solved the problem of poverty in America but it has kept many poor families from an even crueler fate.
5. Anyone who wants to get off welfare can just get a job.
Issues like lack of affordable childcare keep many people out of the job market. It is true that low wage jobs without benefits do not lure everyone out of welfare, but the answer to that is to increase salaries and benefits for working, not cut safety nets.
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/five-media-myths-about-welfare/
According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, The number of veterans dying while waiting for benefit claims has skyrocketed.
900,000 veterans have been waiting for at least 9 months.
In urban areas, like Los Angeles, the wait can be as long as a year and a half. Consequently, in the last three years the number of veterans who died while waiting for benefits has risen from 6,400 to 19,500.
“Support our troops.” You hear that phrase whenever people are beating the drums of war, but when those soldiers come back or need help later in life, our nation grows strangely silent.
http://cironline.org/reports/number-veterans-who-die-waiting-benefits-claims-skyrockets-4074
There are times in one’s life when hope cannot be found in the usual sense of the word. At those light-less times, hope does not mean “optimism,” it means remembering what it takes to remain a human being, and in doing it.
We humans can see some things in the dark that are invisible to the light of day. We recognize some virtues only when we are afraid or confused. Just as an actor enters the plot, not to gain personal victory but to manifest his or her great art, so we must view our own role in this sphere of shifting fate.
According to the ancients, the art of living consists in four classic virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. The art of living consists in recognizing what happens to us does not happen to us alone, but is a larger stage where we are forging our common human destiny.
A prophetic hope moves by joyful sense of duty to all humankind, not by calculations of personal success. There is more joy in losing a noble struggle, than winning an ignoble one. So “hope,” as a spiritual virtue, is not confidence of personal success, but holding on to one’s highest duty and giving one’s best self to one’s highest cause.
It has been said the two rewards of an activist’s life are loving friends and living dreams. We may also add a third reward, the joy of giving our lives to our highest value without needing to be assured of success beforehand. “Hope” is the knowledge that our character does not depend on the wheels of chance, and that nothing can happen to rob us of our opportunity to manifest the virtues, or of the resulting joy.