Thought for Today

"Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know do you know?" -- Gertrude Stein

The State of Our Union

Yesterday's attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and several of her constituents in Tuscon has brought about a great many emotions for Americans across the country. Shock, disbelief, anger; they seem to run the gamut. For me, on the whole, I have a feeling of sadness about this tragedy. A nine year old child was killed. Someone whose entire life was still ahead of him has died. Where is the sense in that? There is none.

The state of our country today is a major concern for almost every American citizen you talk to. I'm shocked at how easily so many of our countrymen give up the freedom to think for themselves while choosing to follow public figures whose own lives are less than exemplary. I find this a very distrubing trend. The young man who perpetrated the massacre in Tuscon, Jared Lee Loughner, was evidently acting on information he received from political affiliations; information that he took and expounded upon in his mind until he found some kind of itnernal justification to do what he did. There is apparently some evidence coming to light that he did not act entirely alone, or that he may have been "put up" to doing this. Either way, his own youth and a follower mentality played a big part in the fatal decisions he made on January 8, 2011. At 22, his own life is now ruined as well.

There is a lot of news coverage going on about Sarah Palin's map showing elected officials in cross hairs too. I have seen this map and it sickens me. Sarah Palin, in my opinion, is a cancer on our nation. People like her go out and run their mouths and people actually listen to them. Here you have a woman who has done very little politically, who has not done much to improve the state of things in America, who came under investigation for her financial practices while serving as governor of Alaska, and who inspires hatred in people, and there are those who are listening to her and buying her books and watching her on television. It is incomprehensible to me.

Her now infamous map, in my opinion, gives her some culpability in what happened in Tuscon. As a public figure, she has a responsibility to act in an adult manner. She should not be engaging in teenage style politics where she can make a map that puts people in the cross hairs of a rifle scope. Doesn't she know that there are impressionable people who are listening to her? People who evidently feel motivated to action by her? If anything, what happened in Tuscon should make Sarah Palin think twice about how she's conducting herself in the public eye. I wonder if she's smart enough to make the connection. Murder and mayhem are not what America is supposed to be about.

The Republican party has been making such a meal out of gaining control of the House of Representatives and our media is feeding that banquet by not focusing on the fact that the GOP effectively split itself with those damn Tea Partiers. They did not come into a majority in the Senate, which means that whatever they try to do or undo will be DOA once it leaves their chamber. Instead of taking the message that Americans as a whole are no longer listening to them, something that ought to spur them into rethinking their tactics, they are merely acting as if they're on top of the world and few people are pointing out to them that they are not. Such behavior only inflames those who follow people like Sarah Palin to act on whatever ideas they think they're getting from folks like her. A young man like Loughner, seeing her sickening map, could very easily think Sarah Palin wants those in her cross hairs eliminated by whatever means possible. Palin did not put the gun in his hand or tell him to do what he did, but her actions certainly could have motivated him to do it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I've said it before and I'll say it again. Do not allow anyone to do your thinking for you. Whoever you follow or whoever you vote for, do not let these people influence your own freedom of choice. It is a dangerous thing to follow anybody to the point where you no longer exercise good judgment or self control. Look to example of Nazi Germany. Intelligent people believed so fervently in Adolph Hitler that they allowed him to rule their lives. They let him do their thinking for them and millions of people lost their lives because of it. Sixty-five years later the world is still recovering from this as well.

The state of our union is in a precarious situation right now. We are moving ahead in the 21st Century while those who remain stuck in the past, clinging to antiquated ideals, are doing whatever they can to inflict as much damage as possible to the future because they hate that their time is passing into history. They only have as much power as we give them. Let's not let them ruin our lives.

If we don't think for ourselves, make our own decisions, and elect officials who will act on what we the people want, we'll continue to have no better than what we have right now. So many of our congressmen and women are simply pushing their own agendas. They're not listening to the people who elected them. They're only listening to a minority that thinks like they do and it is having monumentally detrimental consequences.

People, look to the past and then survey the present. Don't let history repeat itself. Everything comes to its own eventual end. Palin, McCain, Boehner are political dinosaurs, representatives of a set of ideals that is passing away. We can't continue to allow their brand of thinking to infect the present. Now is the time to forge an America for the future.