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RapierFugue -> RE: Arizona Democrat Congresswoman and 11 others shot (1/9/2011 2:14:52 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Lucylastic
So I dunno if you read my last comment..what does happen now??
are you angry enough yet? have enough people died yet? are you wanting change, enough?
What will it take to get to that point?
Ive tried to keep the political shit out of my posts on this thread, but I am hyper frustrated.
PS using the loon who cut of the guys head isnt in the same ball park as six dead, and 12 injured.
He had one knife, one person died,no other injuries, why??? Because it wasnt a gun
This will be my last word on this topic, because I appreciate that no-one wants to hear the truth, especially when it impinges on The Constitution ( a document I find, in most other respects, an admirable work of near-genius), and I also realise absolutely no genuine change whatsoever will come as a result of these recent events, but I don’t see why that should stop the attempt ...
I was born in 1966. In my lifetime there has been, if not a total elimination, than at least a massive strides made, in race-relations and the fight against racism. Nowadays, in the UK at least, we take it for granted that someone will be treated fairly and equally, regardless of their race, religion, colour or sexual persuasion, and when things don't go that way there's a genuine feeling of “WTF?”. I’m given to understand that things are, if not as good in the US, then at least heading that way.
And yet ... I remember a talk I had with my “American” grandfather (I am of mixed background, country-wise) when I was a very young boy. I’d had some homework to do on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and , after we’d been through the factual stuff, he said something like this (and I accept this is from memory, so therefore probably not anywhere near 100% accurate, and this wasn't in the South, but still ...);
“What I can’t believe is how fast it all happened. One minute we were all saying “well that ain’t right – them folks have as much right to this or that as we do”, but others in the same grocery line would shout folk down, or make jokes about black folk in front of others when they tried to talk about such things, and the next it was just taken as read that anyone who spoke up against the rights of black folk (apologies for that term if it offends anyone, but I distinctly remember him using it) was just plain wrong. Not that it got solved, or has been solved, or even will be solved, just that what seemed ok a week or month before now sounded wrong. Those of us who wanted to say we had no problem with any of those civil rights things didn't get power overnight, or win overnight, we just felt like we could say whatever the hell we wanted to, and more than that it wasn't for us to say we were right anymore, it was for the other sort (that’s how he generally referred to racists) to say how they weren’t wrong. It’s the damndest thing (I remember that phrase clear as day) – like one day we were having to accept getting into fights as the price to make ourselves heard, and the next day they had to have fights to stop themselves being shut the hell up.”
And that’s what America has the choice to do today or tomorrow. To make gun ownership something that has to be justified and is seen as being wrong, for other than pest-control purposes. 50 years ago most people were happy to drive drunk. Now it’s rightly seen as socially unacceptable. Same goes for all sorts of things that we once accepted as part of the wallpaper.
So, America; what are you going to do? Wring hands, weep a few tears, then by next Wednesday be back to business as usual? Or are you going to make change happen, for the good of your country and yourselves and, one presumes, for your children? It’s not a question of “gun control”, it’s not a Democrat-this or Republican-that issue – it’s a question of the end to gun ownership.
Not in 50 years time, not next decade, not even next year, but now. Today.
What are you going to do? Over to you.
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