The issues we don't seem to address keep resurfacing--

A good friend of mine posted yesterday on her blog that her pathway to keeping her sanity is to stay off the news feeds as much as possible and to engage in meaningful and joy-producing home-centered activities. I tried that yesterday, and it was a good day, for the most part. I admit to getting very caught up in the news cycle, especially since the bizarre events of two days ago. What is niggling at me about the violence at the political rally is that the very same people who are crying foul (and they should) are the ones who also vociferously cry foul at any attempts at sane gun laws being put into place, especially regarding the possession and use of AR-15-style weapons. 

Another tragic incident involving another young person who, as the reports are indicating, may have felt isolated or powerless. 

That's the sort of thing I'm so worried about, going forward. Too many people reach for a permanent solution like gun violence, and we have to do something far more robust about it. Thoughts and prayers are not enough to solve practical, immediate problems, unless they are joined by purpose and action. Public events of any sort are targets: Super Bowl parades, shopping in stores, going to church, attending school, enjoying outdoor concerts, and now, political rallies. I'd like to go and do things, but it seems unsafe, and I'm certainly not going to bring my grandchild to anything like that. It is entirely too worrisome, and I don't see the situation solving itself. It can't. 

So what do we do? To preserve our own sense of well-being, we have to limit our intake of the toxicity that is spread across all forms of media, main-stream as well as social. But we can't ignore the fact that there are horrors afoot, and we --all of us-- need to address the situation. Yes, we need more mental health strategies taught and embraced in our schools. Yes, we need to enact sane laws that would curb access to weapons that have no purpose but to kill people from a distance and with rapidity. And there needs to be a stop to promoting violence as an acceptable solution to our issues. When a GOP member of Congress stated last week that "some people need killing," I was shocked and sickened. We can't say those sorts of things and not expect that someone might just take up the challenge. 

No one in the Biden administration has "incited assassination" of Trump, so that false and incendiary statement made by yet another GOP member of Congress should be walked back immediately. The prurient, despicable, and classless social-media fodder that leaks out of that camp that depicts violence against their political opposition is a morass that does, in fact, need to be cleaned up, and it's interesting to me that they decry the very guardrails that have been proposed for social media. I'm not going to engage in what-about-isms, but it seems odd to me that people who giggle and repost images of injuries and violence to elected women, to the sitting President, and who then blather on about "decency" have some soul-searching to do. 

Maybe they can start with not wearing lapel pins of assault rifles? 

Lots to think about.

C