Tag Archives: extremism

Beyond Country over Party

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During times of strife and division, we often hear others and sometimes ourselves responding emotionally to events seemingly beyond our control. We may remind ourselves and others to remember our priorities. We say and write slogans such as, “country over party.” Or, perhaps, we may feel events have gone so far we must put party over country “to save” the nation. Or that the working class or the ruling class, depending on where you put yourself if not in the middle, transcend politics and thus our country. Or the Goddess, God, or whatever entity you consider as the Divine must rule over country and planet. All of these perspectives, save for country over party, are destructive, self-destructive, and inevitably result in violence and loss of freedom. Here we look briefly at country over party and go beyond that slogan.  Continue reading →

Guns in America: Paralysis, Polarization, & Do-Nothingism

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Yes, address mental health care, and, yes, more importantly,
Amend the Second Amendment

The numbers make mass shootings in America look like war. Certainly feels like a war. Per the Gun Violence Archive, there have been 214 mass shootings in the United States of America with over 17,300 deaths by guns from New Year’s Day to the end of May 2022. There were 42 recognized mass shootings in the first 23 days of the month of May, then several more, then another 14 over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. This warfare seems bookended by the predatory, hate-filled slaughter of Black people grocery shopping in Buffalo, New York, and the equally hateful, psychopathic hunting down of little kids and their teachers to shoot and kill in Uvalde, Texas.

Those on the Left bellow, “Do something!” Those on the Right shout, “Do nothing!” The outrage, deflections, and self-righteous demonization boils over and continues to divide us further from doing the “something” the majority of Americans demand. Most of those in the moderate middle feel “sick and tired” of grocery stores, houses of worship, restaurants, city streets, schools, more schools, and yet still more schools getting shot up and say, “Enough is enough!”

Even the “commonsense” gun control reforms people want enacted at a federal level including strict background checks for all purchases, tighter regulation of and even banning of certain military-style firearms and types of magazines will only go so far.

We often experience the rigidity of political extremists on both sides. We see, read, and hear their demonization of each other and everyone else with the quest for opposing utopias between the libertarian right and the socialist left drowning out the voices of our vast pragmatic middle. “Mental health issues” is a term bandied about without serious action steps taken to address them.

What to do? The solution is to go to the source of the controversy, the wording of our Second Constitutional Amendment, and reform it. This shall override the ineffective crazy quilt patchwork of conflicting state and local regulations or lack thereof. It’s simple. We do what’s hard. We do what’s hard first! Continue reading →