Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The NRA Is Wrong Again

We have a habit of finding a scapegoat to blame our problems on. When the scapegoat du jour is an inanimate object, it's easy to say our troubles will all go away if we get rid of them. Take, for example, hammers. When confronted with the case of Maxwell and his Silver Hammer, one could say it never would have happened if we had only outlawed them. We don't stop to think about carpenters around the world who use them every day with positive results. But I digress...



Our real problem is multi-layered and has nothing to do weapons. It's "Us vs Them." We take our differences and turn them into battlegrounds. Dems vs Reps, Atheists vs Christians, Rich vs Poor, Science vs Religion, and any of a million other things. If there's a difference, we expand it. If there's a disparity, we blame someone else. We rarely, if ever, take responsibility for our own situation or our future.



So here we sit, feeling tense and miserable about (enter your problem here). Unsatisfied. Hopeless. Blaming someone or something. In that condition some muddle through, some fade away, some rise up and some strike out. McVeigh used fertilizer. If only we had outlawed that a little sooner, or passed laws preventing people from getting it.



Instead of blaming an object for our woes, let's each take responsibility for ourselves, stop vilifying each other, and work on making our communities better places to live.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

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