What a week...
Finally, I have breathing room.
My blown up computer issues took much longer to resolve than I thought they would, and I'd ended up staying way late most of this week to clean up the mess.
I think I'm pretty much back to normal now, so I can take a breath.
Oh, there are so many things going on that require comment. The Planned Parenthood director in Bryan who turned coat and supposedly will be on O'Reilly tonight (though the shooting in Ft. Hood may preempt her) was something I wanted to comment on at length, but I sort of lost my steam. Suffice it to say, I find her claims to be troubling at best and downright lies at worst. I've been involved in her chapter of Planned Parenthood for years, and I don't know a more dedicated group of people.
And the shooting. It's hard to assess at this point what goes on in the head of someone who takes the lives of many in that way. I was horrified at the sheer number of dead and wounded, and it's hard to speculate what happened. What I found interesting, though, is that speculation immediately happened. The right wing blamed the Muslims; the left wing blamed the right wing gun nuts. And I suspect that it's much more complicated than any simple explanation of politics or religion.
I will admit that I am somewhat shocked that it was a physician, as I stupidly and naively sort of assumed that people with lots of education don't do this sort of thing. Rednecks and students and low level postal workers and people with no intellectual grasp of the world take these sorts of measures, I opined from my ivory tower, not someone who went through four years of college, four years of medical school and three years of psychiatry residency. We high falutin' professionals are smarter than that. Shows me.
I told Graham, the former marine, last night that he'll be beseiged by people on both the right and left (including me) who don't know much about the military making all sorts of stupid pronouncements about what happened. I muttered something about how, contrary to the right wing talking points, having an armed populace doesn't seem to stop this sort of thing, and he pointed out that pretty much no one on base is carrying a weapon. MPs are the only ones, and maybe people doing specific training in a designated area, but generally no one is walking around armed. He was actually pretty interested to hear how the guy got his hands on weapons to do this, since they're pretty tightly contained when not in use. And of course, he'll hear all sorts of stuff about how the military shouldn't trust people of Arab descent or Muslims, ignoring the thousands of Muslims that have helped the various ongoing war efforts.
I've never been to Ft. Hood, but I've driven past it a few times. It's a massive complex, and half the Army has been through there at some point or another. I suspect there will be calls for someone's head, here, and I can't really object, if the calls are appropriately directed at the man who did this instead of classes of people who look like him or have names like his. I sort of am glad that he's alive, and maybe he can give some answers as to why he did this terrible thing. Usually after an incident like this one, the perpetrator is also killed, and the whys are left to very simple sounding speculation.
There's an irony, I suppose, that a psychiatrist should be the one to snap. I will guess, too, that there were all sorts of signs that this might happen, but no one saw them or thought much of them. Lots of soldiers, I would guess, don't want to go to warzones, especially if they'd only seen the guys who came back broken.
The flags at my work were at half-mast today, and I am still a little stunned at the vast number of people who were killed and injured. Such a waste. Such a goddamned waste.
My blown up computer issues took much longer to resolve than I thought they would, and I'd ended up staying way late most of this week to clean up the mess.
I think I'm pretty much back to normal now, so I can take a breath.
Oh, there are so many things going on that require comment. The Planned Parenthood director in Bryan who turned coat and supposedly will be on O'Reilly tonight (though the shooting in Ft. Hood may preempt her) was something I wanted to comment on at length, but I sort of lost my steam. Suffice it to say, I find her claims to be troubling at best and downright lies at worst. I've been involved in her chapter of Planned Parenthood for years, and I don't know a more dedicated group of people.
And the shooting. It's hard to assess at this point what goes on in the head of someone who takes the lives of many in that way. I was horrified at the sheer number of dead and wounded, and it's hard to speculate what happened. What I found interesting, though, is that speculation immediately happened. The right wing blamed the Muslims; the left wing blamed the right wing gun nuts. And I suspect that it's much more complicated than any simple explanation of politics or religion.
I will admit that I am somewhat shocked that it was a physician, as I stupidly and naively sort of assumed that people with lots of education don't do this sort of thing. Rednecks and students and low level postal workers and people with no intellectual grasp of the world take these sorts of measures, I opined from my ivory tower, not someone who went through four years of college, four years of medical school and three years of psychiatry residency. We high falutin' professionals are smarter than that. Shows me.
I told Graham, the former marine, last night that he'll be beseiged by people on both the right and left (including me) who don't know much about the military making all sorts of stupid pronouncements about what happened. I muttered something about how, contrary to the right wing talking points, having an armed populace doesn't seem to stop this sort of thing, and he pointed out that pretty much no one on base is carrying a weapon. MPs are the only ones, and maybe people doing specific training in a designated area, but generally no one is walking around armed. He was actually pretty interested to hear how the guy got his hands on weapons to do this, since they're pretty tightly contained when not in use. And of course, he'll hear all sorts of stuff about how the military shouldn't trust people of Arab descent or Muslims, ignoring the thousands of Muslims that have helped the various ongoing war efforts.
I've never been to Ft. Hood, but I've driven past it a few times. It's a massive complex, and half the Army has been through there at some point or another. I suspect there will be calls for someone's head, here, and I can't really object, if the calls are appropriately directed at the man who did this instead of classes of people who look like him or have names like his. I sort of am glad that he's alive, and maybe he can give some answers as to why he did this terrible thing. Usually after an incident like this one, the perpetrator is also killed, and the whys are left to very simple sounding speculation.
There's an irony, I suppose, that a psychiatrist should be the one to snap. I will guess, too, that there were all sorts of signs that this might happen, but no one saw them or thought much of them. Lots of soldiers, I would guess, don't want to go to warzones, especially if they'd only seen the guys who came back broken.
The flags at my work were at half-mast today, and I am still a little stunned at the vast number of people who were killed and injured. Such a waste. Such a goddamned waste.