As our faithful readers are aware I have been warning that Somebody Is Going To Be Hurt for quite a while. What happened yesterday didn’t surprise me. I’d been expecting it. The fact that it happened in Arizona… again, not a surprise.
What is surprising is how quickly everyone moved to define the shooter’s politics – which is difficult because mentally imbalanced people rarely have a clear, sensible ideology. What triggers them tends to be the volume of the voices inside and outside their head.
And while the voices inside their head can lead them to violence, the voices outside their head tell them their anger is real and supply them with their insane justification. The volume is pumped up.
Firing up people in politics is an age old practice, but what’s been happening recently is unlike anything I’ve experienced in my lifetime. Words matter.
Phil says: “Normal” people do not do things like this no matter what side of the aisle they lean. Video games, MTV, books, TV personalities… Yeah, they really make sane people go and shoot children in the face. Would it of been better if he was left, and she was a R? Or maybe if it was because he thought it would be a good idea to just shoot people at an unprotected rally.
Let’s skip over the nonsense of that comment to the point that if this rhetoric doesn’t calm down then no one is safe from a crazy person, and the odds that Ds and Rs will be hurt increases when we keep preaching to the crazy.
What’s given is that crazy people will do crazy things. What has to stop is the outside voices that are giving direction (targets) to their craziness.