Catching Up - Play Ball?

Long time, no blog.  Between my work schedule of late and bonding with our new pup, Charlie, I've fallen woefully behind.  So I'm going to be playing catch-up, possibly in a torrent of posts.

Schedule notwithstanding, I couldn't bring myself to post anything in the immediate aftermath of the tragic shooting at the Republican team's practice for the Congressional baseball game.  Not because I'm a Republican (I'm not), and not because I have any stronger feelings about Republican Congressmen being shot at than Democrats.  All partisan violence is abhorrent to me.  In fact, increasingly, all extreme, over-the-top partisan rancor and rhetoric is abhorrent to me.

Time to tone it down.

One of the unfortunate by-products of the 24/7 cable news environment is the propensity to want to assign blame for things.  Within 24 hours of any incident, the finger-pointing begins.  Whose fault was it?  In my view, that tends to demean the tragedy itself, and turns it into an exercise unworthy of dignified consideration.

I've seen, heard and read blame being ascribed to the Left, to the Right, to Donald Trump, to guns, to the media, mental illness, and to just about everything but global warming.  To be sure, various factors play an indirect role.  But all that direct blame is misplaced.

First and foremost, blame lies at the feet of one James Hodgkinson.  He alone targeted his victims, for his own reasons.  He alone loaded his weapons and pulled the trigger, repeatedly.  The gun didn't fire itself.  No one on the left deliberately goaded him into taking this damnable action.  He is to blame.  Period.  And he paid the price for his deplorable actions.

Now, let's talk about influence.  Should he have had access to the weapons he had access to?  The rifle he used was not a particularly powerful one.  You wouldn't use it to shoot big game.  It fell well within his Second Amendment rights to own.

I posted on Facebook over a year ago about the gun issue, trying to bring sanity to the topic by defining what an assault rifle is and what an AR-15 is, because most people with strong opinions on the gun issue have no earthly clue what they're talking about.  Sadly but predictably, it didn't sway anyone from their pre-conceived notions.  The truth will only set you free if you recognize it, and truth has been devalued more than crude oil over the past several years.

The question of gun ownership among the mentally ill has been raised.  But I haven't read any credible account of the shooter to suggest that he was mentally ill.  Sure, he'd been the subject of other complaints: shooting his guns on his own property, domestic violence (which, sadly, is not indicative of mental illness; too many sane people abuse their loved ones).

Hodgkinson was, by all accounts, a successful business owner, a property inspector.  He was also radical in his political views.  And this is an important point:  there are a lot of people who are radical in their political views - on the left and on the right - who are perfectly sane.  Extreme, perhaps, but sane.  And the line between that extremism and violence can be thin.

The man was a Bernie supporter.  Bernie is anti-gun.  So it's hard to make the quantum leap that Bernie's politics encouraged this act, which Bernie himself described as despicable.  The perpetrator was anti-Trump; so are a lot of people who would never commit an act of violence on the basis of their political views.

Still, the rhetoric is pretty over the top.  Madonna said she'd thought about blowing up the White House after Trump was elected.  Kathy Griffin posed for her now-infamous picture with a fake beheaded Trump.  Snoop Dogg (why does this talentless guy still garner media attention?) featured shooting Trump in a video.  And on, and on.

Sure, there was equally disgusting anti-Obama rhetoric, just not nearly as much - Ted Nugent, the bombing of Emmanuel Cleaver's campaign headquarters, etc.  The "you do it too" defense just doesn't cut it here, but it points to the fact that the anti-"other side" rhetoric has gone entirely too far.

I found it ironic that, the day of the shooting, George Stephanopolous, ABC talking head, former Bill Clinton staffer, and Clinton Foundation contributor, wondered aloud whether the extreme partisan rhetoric in this country might have played a role in the shooting.  Hey George, you're part of the reason for that.  You foment that rhetoric at every opportunity.  So yeah, the media is complicit.  And I'm not just talking about George, or Rachel Maddow, or Chris Matthews, or Keith Olbermann.  Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin have also played a role in ratcheting up the partisan rhetoric.

The entertainment world also has to acknowledge a share of the burden.  Not just fringe no-talents like Griffin and Snoop Dogg, or talented (you have to admit, the guy is a brilliant guitarist) but fringe names like Nugent, but accoladed stalwarts like Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep, have contributed to the current divide.

Then, let's talk about the gun debate.  Now, those guns didn't just up and load themselves, and fire at the Republican Congressmen on that baseball field.  But to listen to the anti-gun brigade, you'd think they had.  To her credit, even Gabby Giffords, herself the victim of gun violence, didn't go there in her comments after the shooting.  Again, re-hashing the gun debate here isn't going to sway anyone from their pre-conceived notions.

But some did take that extreme position.  One Facebook poster said that he didn't want anyone grieving beside him if they were pro-gun rights.  That's okay, dude.  I don't want to be grieving beside you, either.  Because my grief is genuine, while yours is disingenuous.  You're merely exploiting a tragic situation to forward your own political agenda, while I am truly grieving for the potential loss of life, and the very real loss of security.

Moreover, your intolerance of any view that differs from yours is a major part of the problem.  "I won't stand next to someone whose views disagree with my own."  Wouldn't it be more tolerant to say, "I want you to grieve alongside me, then I want to engage in a discussion with you, so I can try to understand where you're coming from, and have an opportunity to try to persuade you to my views"?  To be unwilling to even consider the opinions of others is a statement of extreme intolerance, and that's the first step toward a violent reaction to those whose views differ from your own.

Look, I'd like to be able to say that the rhetoric is equally bad from both sides of the political spectrum.  Maybe it's a function of who I'm friends with, or what news outlets I follow (for the record, I have friends from all walks of the political spectrum, and I watch CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox, CNBC - an affiliate of NBC and MSNBC - Bloomberg, One America News, and BBC, and I read news outlets ranging from Al-Jazeerah to Der Spiegel; I also don't read blogs like Drudge or Occupy Democrats, because they're ... well, factless garbage).

I'd like to be able to say that, but in the current environment ... I'm afraid I can't.  I see more vitriol from the left than from the right these days.  Probably because the left lost an election they thought they couldn't lose, to a candidate they thought they couldn't lose to, and they're still bitter about that.  Fine.  So focus your energy on how you're going to keep that from happening in 2018 and 2020.  Don't re-litigate 2016 at every turn, and vow to do your damnedest to eradicate the outcome of 2016.  That only fosters notions of desperate action as the only alternative.  We survived eight years of Barack Obama; we'll survive four years of Donald Trump.

Consider Nancy Pelosi, the crowned queen of the Democrat party.  Less than 24 hours after the tragic shooting, she was blaming Republicans for the outbreak of violence, which totally negated any positive remarks she made on the House floor in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

Simply put, Nancy Pelosi is a despicable human being.  Always has been, always will be.  Probably best to just ignore her, and look forward to the happy day that she steps down from office.

So we're left with an abhorrent act committed by an abhorrent individual, crazy or otherwise.  What we do with that will determine whether this politically caustic environment continues to spawn acts of violence, or whether we return to a world where we all accept the realities of a democratic republic, in which sometimes our "side" wins and sometimes it loses.

We tend to forget that what divides us is smaller than what we share in common.  We are all human beings.  We are all Americans.  We all want the best for all citizens of this republic.  We differ greatly on what that looks like, how it's realized.  But at the end of the day, we want the same thing.  We shouldn't be killing each other over how we get there, or wanting to kill each other over how we get there.  Family members shouldn't be unfriending their relatives on Facebook over their political differences.

When we reach that level of intolerance, we are only promoting the kind of intolerance that inevitably leads to tragedy.