Dear Editor,
Once again, and again and again, killing does not belong in politics or anywhere else. Unfortunately when people and politicians try to take control of people’s personal lives—taking control of their bodies and condemning them for not loving children or condemning them for who they chose to love or calling them communists if they don’t belong to your political party, or masked men with guns going after the most vulnerable of our coworkers and church members and friends and the friends of our children at school—is it any wonder so many are over-stressed to the point that someone not in their right mind could take a gun and shoot someone?
To shoot someone who was just exercising their freedom of speech or just being who they are. It seems there is no tolerance for differences today. The fear and anxiety people are feeling are playing out in a multitude of ways.
And it doesn’t help matters taking away federal programs and jobs from millions of Americans including federal funding for mental health when today we need it more than ever. Americans are crying out “enough is enough.”
We should all be entitled to our own opinions and beliefs regardless how they differ. As was shown when I sat next to a lady while we waited to be helped with our cable bill, we talked about the struggles we’re having with staying on top of our bills that seems to be only getting worse. And although we agreed to disagree what the cause was we both laughed when I said, “we must be getting our news from a different news channel!”
And then we reminisced about the days of Walter Cronkite when we all got our news from the same few TV channels we had back then (and certainly no cell phones with a multitude of talking heads), we were less biased and more mainstream. Life was simpler and easier then.
But then I’m not a person of color. I’m fully aware they had problems and challenges and assassinations, some racially motivated in the early fifties and sixties when I was growing up. But it seems it’s come back to rear its ugly head.
White supremacy and racism is on the rise. But that, too, is a heated subject. So for now, I’ll just say this: I miss there being in both political parties when we lived by the golden rule: “live and let live.”
Our constitution addresses it and our democracy expects it. Yet today, we are not living by it. And now—another senseless killing.
JM
You are a clueless liberal and part of the problem. Your opinion is nothing what Walter Cronkite would give. He gave the news, not his opinion.
That’s the Golden Rule!