In Lobbyists We Trust

“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 900^th “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.