Pens Win. Me? Not so much. / Orlando
Hey, another post, and this one at a respectable hour, too!
The Pens won another Cup, finally. No more Max, who left pretty soon after the '09 win. It's been seven years. In a lot of ways, this chapter of my life began those seven years ago. My brother was still here, but just about to leave to Maryland. Lauren and I began dating, and I started work as an abstractor not long after. In a lot of ways things have come back around in ways that I'm not quite ready to be honest about. Some of those things have to change, while others may linger for some years to come.
There was another mass shooting yesterday that everyone is on about. This one was akin to the San Bernadino shooting in that it was religiously motivated, and we're back on the great do-nothing debate on gun control. At this point, I think the genie is out of the bottle, and there's no real gettin' it back in there. Magazine fed, semi-automatic rifles and pistols have been here to stay for very nearly a century, and in spite of all of the awful shootings in the news, statistics repeatedly show that gun deaths, crime, and violence in general have been steadily on the decline for some time now. What is up are these mass shootings: People going postal and domestic acts of terrorism.
What can't be overlooked here is that what happened in Orlando was both religiously and politically motivated. Religious in that this was how that man chose to spread his evangel. Political in that in addition to his hopes that it would spark a discussion about the LGBT community and that this man was able to legally purchase his firearms very soon before going on this rampage, in spite of several investigations into his character. In my opinion, he was essentially taunting law enforcement and telling America that people like him are willing to abuse our rights and privileges in order to have us either live in fear and/or overreact and cause a full blown war or discrimination/ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Middle Eastern ethnics so that they can be justified in their violence and hatred of the West.
On the first count, he was never going to succeed with the sane. On the second, he has been and will continue to be much more successful. We will pick at ourselves and our government from both sides, long after we've forgotten the victims and the asshole who killed them all. The left will live in fear of both mass shootings and half-cocked retaliations from more idiots with weapons and attempt to ratchet down society so that we're safe from our own nature, taking away our rights and privacy in the name of safety, though to be fair the right is equally adept at that game. The right will live in fear that the left will get their way, and overreact in the manner we've become all too familiar and teeter on the brink of making society less free in other ways.
What I doubt anyone will advocate is turning the other cheek, and Ghandi'ing our way through this ideological challenge. Instead of doing something expedient by taking away our weapons and stripping away centuries old natural rights, or unlawfully imprisoning/deporting everyone of ethnic descent from the Muslim world and other self-destructive, xenophobic policies, how about we hold fast to our way of life? We as a society have to become more savvy about what exactly this event was. Calling this "another shooting" is like calling 9/11 "another plane crash." There were motivations that go well beyond a small man wanting to feel powerful by killing people with a gun. He was trying to put a bullet in American society, too. We need to be able to identify this from afar if we and our way of life are to prevail.
The Pens won another Cup, finally. No more Max, who left pretty soon after the '09 win. It's been seven years. In a lot of ways, this chapter of my life began those seven years ago. My brother was still here, but just about to leave to Maryland. Lauren and I began dating, and I started work as an abstractor not long after. In a lot of ways things have come back around in ways that I'm not quite ready to be honest about. Some of those things have to change, while others may linger for some years to come.
There was another mass shooting yesterday that everyone is on about. This one was akin to the San Bernadino shooting in that it was religiously motivated, and we're back on the great do-nothing debate on gun control. At this point, I think the genie is out of the bottle, and there's no real gettin' it back in there. Magazine fed, semi-automatic rifles and pistols have been here to stay for very nearly a century, and in spite of all of the awful shootings in the news, statistics repeatedly show that gun deaths, crime, and violence in general have been steadily on the decline for some time now. What is up are these mass shootings: People going postal and domestic acts of terrorism.
What can't be overlooked here is that what happened in Orlando was both religiously and politically motivated. Religious in that this was how that man chose to spread his evangel. Political in that in addition to his hopes that it would spark a discussion about the LGBT community and that this man was able to legally purchase his firearms very soon before going on this rampage, in spite of several investigations into his character. In my opinion, he was essentially taunting law enforcement and telling America that people like him are willing to abuse our rights and privileges in order to have us either live in fear and/or overreact and cause a full blown war or discrimination/ethnic cleansing against Muslims and Middle Eastern ethnics so that they can be justified in their violence and hatred of the West.
On the first count, he was never going to succeed with the sane. On the second, he has been and will continue to be much more successful. We will pick at ourselves and our government from both sides, long after we've forgotten the victims and the asshole who killed them all. The left will live in fear of both mass shootings and half-cocked retaliations from more idiots with weapons and attempt to ratchet down society so that we're safe from our own nature, taking away our rights and privacy in the name of safety, though to be fair the right is equally adept at that game. The right will live in fear that the left will get their way, and overreact in the manner we've become all too familiar and teeter on the brink of making society less free in other ways.
What I doubt anyone will advocate is turning the other cheek, and Ghandi'ing our way through this ideological challenge. Instead of doing something expedient by taking away our weapons and stripping away centuries old natural rights, or unlawfully imprisoning/deporting everyone of ethnic descent from the Muslim world and other self-destructive, xenophobic policies, how about we hold fast to our way of life? We as a society have to become more savvy about what exactly this event was. Calling this "another shooting" is like calling 9/11 "another plane crash." There were motivations that go well beyond a small man wanting to feel powerful by killing people with a gun. He was trying to put a bullet in American society, too. We need to be able to identify this from afar if we and our way of life are to prevail.