Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Heartsick

 having quite a time with blogger. I am not sure where my post went. 

I am heartsick today about the school shooting in Texas. 18 dead children. 

I had to turn off the news. The facts of the matter were sickening enough, but a father was shown, his eyes hidden by sunglasses. A reporter had a microphone thrust in his face. He said, "I just need to find my baby," and his face twitched. 

The reporter asked, "What is your worst fear?" 

What the actual fuck?

The news needs to be reported. I'm not disputing that. The facts must be relayed. It is not necessary to exploit the parents' anguish. It is not only unnecessary. It is unkind. It is cruel.

It was also a mind numbingly stupid question. 

So my heart breaks tonight, for what has happened, but also for what WILL happen, which is nothing. Nothing at all. We will be sickened and outraged and not one thing will change. 

We've made some great progress today on the renovation, and tomorrow, we are taking the day off. We are going to the retirement property to get the garden tilled and to get things planted. There is sanity to be found in the garden. 

PS: I want you to know that I'm commenting on your blogs, but the comments seem to have disappeared. 

38 comments:

  1. Thanks for your post today. I too fear nothing will change, but we can't give up. We have to act for our children, if not ourselves. It doesn't have to be like this. So many of our societal problems are made worse by the easy access to guns. If we can just get guns out of the equation, we can deal with the other issues.

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    1. We cannot make any progress on this because the NRA spends a lot of money buying their politicians. The majority of Americans favor common sense gun laws, but there is a loud and vocal minority who refuse to concede, politicians who refuse to do anything that might endanger their political careers. My husband is a sportsman and a hunter. No American needs an assault weapon. Let's start there.

      But we won't.

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    2. The smoking problem in this country was similar with a very powerful tobacco industry driving public policy, but great progress has been made on that front. That gives me some hope.

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  2. Waking up to this news this morning. Biden calls it 'carnage' but of course the answer of making guns illegal will never be addressed by a certain marjority of people who will be attending the NRA meeting today. The tragedy of those children mown down by a young man will live with their parents forever. All the talk in the world will not bring them back.

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    1. We live in a time where the majority of rational minds are held hostage by extremist thinking. The majority of Americans favor rational gun laws. However, it cannot even be discussed. There is no compromise in some minds.

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  3. Until some action happens on restricting lethal weapons nothing will change.
    Until the mindset of some people changes, until others don't just think of the money they will no longer make, how can you make changes...and that applies anywhere to anything.

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    1. We will never take that first step, I'm afraid.

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  4. When I look at some of the people around us here I am very thankful for our gun laws. It is a shame that people don't have to submit to a psychological test before being allowed to own any weapon.

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    1. When you look at the hoops that a person needs to jump through to be able to drive a car on the road, it seems ridiculous that gun ownership has virtually no regulation at all.

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  5. Just listening to early morning news here. Stats say that the most common way for children to die in the US is by gunshot - frightening. They said US has 120 guns for every 100 people.
    So sad that nothing will change - except perhaps teachers will be armed!


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    1. I have heard people that I respect say the same thing. But here's the rub. Not all teachers are good people. Giving them all guns is not the answer.

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  6. What a horror. I woke to fourteen dead and during the day the figure climbed. It doesn't seem to matter how hard some people and politicians try, nothing changes with your gun ownership.
    Both of your posts came through on my RSS feed but they are slightly different.
    A lot of comments on my blog are going into the spam folder. I am checking it daily now.

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    1. Ah yes, three comments from you now in spam. Fixed it up.

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    2. I had the post up, and it disappeared. I wrote the same post over again and published it.

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  7. It certainly is/was a gut punch, especially after last week at Tops. Although I caucus with the Republicans, I think they are wrong for not entertaining more restrictive gun laws.

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    1. Ed, Tim and I were talking this morning. He is a hunter. He owns many guns, but the various gun legislations proposed would not affect him or any other hunter we know. There has to be a compromise.

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    2. Most definitely. It sounds like from the news this morning that this evil boy bought two assault rifles recently. There is no reason for an 18 year old kid, short of being given one while on military duty, to have one of those, much less two. I am also hearing that the police were chasing him which caused him to wreck his truck by the school and perhaps made it a target of convenience. Yet another hard lesson that perhaps we don't need to have high speed pursuits.

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    3. I did not hear that. I heard though that he posted that he was going to shoot his grandmother. He then posted that he HAD shot his grandmother. He then posted "Children b afraid." The fact that no one alerted police that he was on a rampage is horrifying to me.

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    4. Reading further, he wasn't being chased while in his vehicle. The police were called to the the crash and saw him rushing into the school, wearing body armor and carrying a weapon. He had posted on social media 15 minutes before that he was headed to the elementary school. Police got that information at about the same time they got to the crash scene.

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    5. Yeah, I heard that wasn’t true too. I heard though that one of the responding police lost his child in the shooting. I hope something comes from this but due to mid term elections and the republicans frothing at the thought of taking control, I’m not optimistic.

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  8. P.S. I’ve been having an abnormal amount of comments since the “upgrade” end up in the spam folder. Almost daily I have to rescue a comment, most of the time from long term commenters.

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    1. I check my spam folder daily at this point.

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  9. I'm seeing your comments! I don't know why Blogger has become so twitchy lately.

    When Sandy Hook happened, I thought, "THIS is it. This is the event that will finally force the United States to reform its gun laws." And...nothing. Instead a parade of conspiracies and senseless obfuscation. I've given up that it will ever happen. We are a sick society.

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    1. When someone values their rights more than the life of a child, we've lost our way.

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  10. It is ineffably sad and frustrating.

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    1. I woke up this morning at 5 AM. I finally just got up. My mind could not stop grieving and thinking, 'What if...'?

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  11. These are the babies that should be protected. My heart breaks for all of them - all of you. All of us.

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    1. Nope. Protect the unborn. Once they're born, they're on their own. We have well and truly lost our way, that's for sure.

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  12. I feel as you do - it is all so terribly sad.

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  13. The shooting is obscene and the fact that there have been 30 shootings at schools so far this year in the US is a huge problem. When are people going to get tired of their own children being gunned down, in their own schools? The US has a gun and violence problem which needs to be addressed and nobody seems to have the balls to do that. It's sickening.

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    1. It just amazes me that there is so much resistance to any new legislation to solve this problem. I actually heard a gun shop owner claiming that it is the government's responsibility to take these people "out of society". He stressed that he did not mean off the streets, but to remove them from society. How do you do that?

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  14. By the way your post published twice! I have put my own blog on my following list...that does help me see if I have missed or double posted

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    1. Really? I published it once. It disappeared. I typed it up again and hit publish for the second time. I only see it once.

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  15. You're right that nothing will change and there will only be "thoughts and prayers" offered. I am sickened.

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  16. We are being held hostage to the second amendment by fifty senators.

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  17. I understand the American second amendment (although do wonder how it actually applies over 200 years after it was deemed necessary) but what I don't understand is the permission for these high powered assault weapons. Guns for hunting, guns for self protections, guns for target practice - sure. But something that can wipe out dozens of people at once? Don't get that.

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