*Before I start this post, I would like to take a moment to think about the thousands of children who have died in Somalia due to the turmoil that has rocked that region.............................
Let's keep those poor children in our thoughts.
Now unfortunately, here in A-merry-ca, gun violence has once again caused unspeakable horror to hit a small community:
"COPLEY, Ohio — A man apparently angry with his girlfriend gunned down two people outside an Ohio home and two more in a car Sunday morning, then shot the girlfriend in a rampage that left eight dead including the gunman, who was shot by police, authorities and witnesses said.
Two others were wounded, police said. A child was among those shot, witnesses said, though police wouldn’t confirm that. Investigators were trying to piece together what happened at four crime scenes, Copley police Chief Michael Mier said.
A neighbor, Gilbert Elie, said he was getting ready for church when he heard gunshots and cries for help in his northeast Ohio neighborhood, a wooded, residential area outside Akron. He went to a house across the street and said he found a shocking scene: the woman who lived there lying in the driveway, her husband shot near the garage, and their young granddaughter and another woman sho t in the front seat of a vehicle, the windows apparently blown out by gunfire.
A third woman came out of the house next door and tried to talk to Elie, he said, but their brief exchange ended abruptly when a man followed her out of the house and shot her, sending the 75-year-old Elie running for safety behind a truck.
“She was talking to me, and he come up behind her and shot her, so I figured, maybe I’m next,” he told The Associated Press.
He hid until he could see the gunman was gone, then returned home. Police arrived, and Elie said he heard a second round of shots coming from behind the houses and assumed officers had killed the gunman." [Story]
It seems that I do one of these stories at least once a month. I am sure that I will be doing another one again really soon.
Finally, over at The Root, someone wants to know if the left has lost its passion:
"...The Tea Party's remarkable victory reminds us that a radical splinter group can seize control of the issues and impose its will by threatening to wreck the system if it does not get its way.
That is a lesson that the left used to know back in the days of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements but seems to have forgotten since the presidential election of Barack Obama. The old distinction once drawn between mass social movements and political campaigns was lost in the emotional fervor aroused by the triumph of the first African-American president.
A lot of us acted as though Obama's election was an end in itself, rather than a means to accomplishing the change that his candidacy promised. But the election was never really about just getting Obama elected. It was about our ability to compel the new president and the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress to respond to our needs and our demands.
To do that, we still needed a movement, separate and apart from the president's political apparatus, that could support him when he did the right thing and pressure him when he didn't. As evangelical activist Jim Wallis recently wrote, "it was the robust activism of those independent progressive movements of the past that created the space for major reforms and made other presidencies memorable. That's because social change does not ultimately rest on who is in the White House, but a movement outside of Washington, D.C., that makes fundamental reforms possible." [Full article]
Yes, a movement "outside of Washington", indeed. But where will it come from?
Starting a movement these days requires money. The tea party clowns had lots of it. They were bought and paid for by wealthy folks who bankrolled all types of front groups. Their passion was manufactured and it was made easier to do so because of the color arousal (thanks for that word, Francis) that gripped most of the folks who rode with them. (See those people* in the picture? Most of them probably lost their jobs under George Bush.)
There is no passion on the left because the propagandist on the right have done a damn good job of selling their snake oil to you A-merry-cans. "We are all in this together. We are A-merry-cans first, and we will not let those lefties take us down a path to Socialism."Yeah right. Even the so called progressives in this country still align themselves with one politrickster or another. But it's the same old run around. It just feel a little better because the guy screwing you happened to buy you a drink, first.
But this could all change soon. As the wealth gap widens and folks start to see that they have been played, maybe the passion will come back. Politricksters in both political parties care about only one thing: staying in power. And they will do whatever it takes to keep going back to Washington. Hopefully a time will come in this country when the rest of us will start doing everything in our powers to make sure that they don't. Or, better yet, even if they do get to Washington; what they do when they get there wont even matter.
