The original version of this month’s column went out the window with the tragic events that took place in early July in Dallas, when a sniper opened fire at Dallas police officers during a protest event.
Now I am not going to focus on the two most obvious issues that spring from this incident, gun control and racism, because during the four and a half years I have written this column I believe I have made my beliefs known on both those subjects.
I would never want to completely abolish an American citizens right to own certain types of firearms and I think I have made it clear as well that hatred of any sort is just not right for me.
The topic here is the loss of life, the fact that any man thinks he can peer into the soul of another and take away the lives of innocent people. It is one thing to believe in a cause or to be able to exercise your right to freedom of speech, it is quite another when an individual’s twisted sense of the cause he supports leads to murder and chaos.
Murdering your own kind, who might have actually had nothing to do with what you are passionately angry about, only fuels the fires in all directions, taking down a structured conversation towards a solution and turning time to ash.
A fire has no conscience, no plan or targets, it just gleefully destroys all in it’s path.
We can point fingers at each other, blame our elected officials and our laws, but none of that replaces the fact that in the twenty-first century, we are still waging war and bringing death based on the most pointless and outdated labels, like color of skin and rich versus poor.
The day after the attack occurred I wrote a post on my blog that was kind of heated, because I just don’t get how we have come to this as a society. We are not barbarians, having to go out and hunt for dinner with a club and incapable of deep rational thought.
Acting the way we do towards other Human beings is beginning to rub through and it’s spilling it’s way out into the world drip by gruesome drip.
It is time to stop.
Let us make sure that all of the death that has taken place was not for nothing, let’s make sure we remember we are all sharing this little rock that is orbiting a star, all dependent on each other for a better tomorrow.
The media will force many ideologies down our throats now, some for political gain, others just to get your hand off your television remote, but the opinions, rebuttals and possibly even the possibility of more violence will arise in the coming weeks and months.
Information is just information.
There can only be so much debate involved for a subject matter that is costing lives, costing families to suffer loss and that is throwing the country into chaos.
Dialogue must start on the common ground that the majority of us do not want to see anyone dead from violent acts in our streets, none of us wants to be wary to leave out homes and no one wants to see the level of freedoms available in this country to falter or fall.
If we start now to honor the lives of the fallen from all of the recent out breaks of domestic violence and say not one more death, start on the common ground of survival, we just may have a chance to escape a seemingly escalating situation.
