“If one person in this world, the
NRA president, anybody, can tell me why we need assault weapons with 30 shots
in the thing,” said Syracuse basketball coach JIm Boeheim after a news
conference celebrating his 900th “This is our fault. This is my
fault and your fault. All of your faults if we don’t get out and do something
about this. If we can’t get this thing done, I’m with (Mayor Michael)
Bloomberg, if we can’t get this thing done, I don’t know what kind of country
we have. This is about us. This isn’t about the President or those other people
down there. We have to make them understand somehow that this needs to get
figured out. Real quick. Not six months from now.” Outrage indeed. It is our
fault just as it is our fault our democracy has been stolen with a government
controlled by lobbyists.
In 1946 anywhere from 200 to 2,000
citizens in Tennessee attacked a jail where police had kept election ballots
they had stolen during an election. This incident as well as “Shays’ Rebellion”,
a 1786-87 uprising against local corruption are often cited by gun advocates in
defense of assault weapons. They are
wrong simply because times have changed although I don’t see a problem with
someone owning assault rifles if they and their weapons register with the FBI.
Information and awareness are now our greatest weapons against tyranny and
corruption. We no longer need machine guns to reform the government of the
United States just as we in the information age no longer need lobbyists to
reform our government. We now have a voice and as indolent and inadequate as we
are the democracy is here, right here, right in front of us. About half the
nation is very much lost in the manusha of political deception so this new
thing called the internet and this even newer thing called the occupy movement
is not going to work until we add necessary education to our school system. Lobbyists
and their legally corrupt stranglehold is the root of all our problems in this
country. Education and awareness is a powerful and necessary tool in order to
have a just and equitable democracy. Once again the distortion of the news media’s
need to find new angles and entertainment value to tell stories is clouding the
argument and parsing our dilemmas. Issues concerning your life and the politics
played to distort their status does not change with word games and "newspeak" or "washingtonspeak".
Beyond the dull siren of redundancy
on gun control is something else being lost and that’s the need for
spirituality and access to mental health care and education. It’s obvious that most
if not all of the mass murders in our society suffered from anti-social
behavior. It’s just common sense for our educational system to focus on
anti-social behavior and major warning signs to initiate new programs for
interventions. What better way to engage these types of behavior than thru
spiritual studies or mental health education. Religious studies and mental
health studies must be mandatory. In such an endeavor our society would also
change into a more harmonious one. Former Governor Mike Huckabee’s reaction on
Fox News was incorrect and somewhat insulting in saying it was purely a heart
issue not needing any new gun laws. That is a very unchristian view but his
comments about needing God in schools is partly true. "We ask why there's
violence in our schools, but we've systematically removed God from our
schools," Huckabee said. "Should we be so surprised that schools
would become a place of carnage?" The tone is harsh and crude, but this
country was founded on religious freedom and in order to completely honor all
religious freedom we must teach our children about the world’s major religions.
Moments of silence and allowing students to have other means of spiritual
outlets at schools should also be considered. Even atheists that rail against
any violation of separating church and state cannot deny the benefits of
meditation contemplation or prayer. Just as we seek to embrace our racial
diversities so to must we embrace and more importantly discover our spiritual
ones.
