We went to visit the Alabama State Capitol on Thursday. I owe the journal a post for that day and it will be forthcoming when I get around to it in the next day or two. I have made some progress with a couple other posts in the last day or two.
In the news, we see the President and Speaker of the House (Obama and Boehner) are, as of this moment, still miles apart, playing the roles of Thelma and Louise in a sick remake of the original movie of the same name. Unfortunately, they'll be pulling a trailer loaded with all 300 million of us as they drive off the "fiscal cliff" at the end of the year.
Then on Friday we all learned of the tragedy at the elementary school in Newtown Connecticut. 20 young children and 6 or 7 adults were gunned down in a senseless crazy act. Like most people, I could rant and yell and make assumptions and say what we need to do to stop this. But I won't. I don't think you can stop someone from doing crazy stupid things when they're planning their own suicide as the final act in a horrific play. The solutions are much more complicated than gun control, disarming the population, locking everyone in armored rooms, and turning the USA into a police state. Unfortunately, the people we have running the joint don't have the ability to think deeply or long term (or at all), so it's anybody's guess what we're going to do about it. In all likelihood, very little.
And, looking at the calendar, I see this coming Friday is the end of the world.
What?
That's right. Some people think this because the Mayan Calendar just ends on December 21, 2012. Hmmm. I looked at my calendar and it looks like I've got the same problem... only my calendar ends on December 31. But then I remembered that when confronted by the same problem last year I came up with what I thought was a creative solution... I got a new calendar. You'd think one of these gullible people would have thought of this before they assume the end of a calendar means the end of the world and get everyone so riled up.
3 comments:
Thelma and Louise, striking analogy! With luck its not going to be a grand canyon sized fiscal cliff, maybe they'll land on a mule trail and just get everybody a bit shaken up, but keep on trucking. Certainly hope so anyway because its not just one trailer being pulled, its a whole train load more or less tightly coupled to the USA rig and there's a couple of billion more who are likely to get pretty bad whiplash!
On the recent shootings, I think you are dead right. No easy solutions. The USA already has 20 times the gun murder rate of the average developed country. Including Switzerland and Israel, when they used to have as many guns per capita as the USA ( although they don't any more, and they have recently tighten up their gun laws considerably). Anyway just banning guns is not the answer. In my web wanderings I just came across some fanatic on the pro-gun side of the issue, saying that the solution is not to disarm anybody, but to arm everybody. Somehow I don't think that is going to solve it either. More sophisticated and sensible thought required. And as you say, unfortunately that's not likely to happen any time soon.
Maybe we should let the world end, they we could start over fresh...
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