Friday, June 29, 2018

Filling a Blank Space with Invisible Ink, June 29 2018



Really, I thought I had seen almost everything until I happened upon photos last week of young gun protestor David Hogg, walking the streets of New York during his book tour (oh god yes, his book tour) with apparently armed guards.  He joins several tons in weight of celebrities and politicians who crab about firearms, yet can't seem to muster the firmness of their beliefs to shun human protectors with guns.

I wish somebody had been armed and ready when a pathetic little nothing named Ramos emptied bullets, blind rage and the darkest of evil intent into unsuspecting members of a newspaper staff in Maryland Thursday.   With estimates of, what, some 400 million or more guns in America,  it seems a lot of them should be posted in a myriad of places where the best of intentions can be carried out quickly when necessary.  Not that the political left will go for that, of course.

When I was at least semi-respectable and wrote for some national magazines a few years ago, there were those rare occasions when correspondence from the crazies would arrive in the mailbox.  They weren't threatening, just pretty much void of sense or logic.  The kind of mail you don't care to answer because there's nothing to say.  Yet, some letters, though on the edge, were also accomplished by people of apparently immense intelligence -- but the word, "disturbed" could not be excluded.

Whether the conversation involves schools, newspaper offices or movie theaters, we hasten to suggest that the solution to gun violence is indeed guns.  We cannot pretty-please our way out of human irrationality, seasoned grudges or situations where society's dangerously squirming brains go on the attack.  Some events can only be confronted in like ways.  Period.

The Supreme Court:  Whew!  If you lean conservative, look at it this way -- if you tire of your vote counting as virtually meaningless in "blue states" where radical leftists hold the reigns, Trump's determined appointment of traditional judges to the Court will be the vote you couldn't make, and this one's gonna count in bigger ways than many will suspect.

Meanwhile, it didn't require consultations with a psychic to know that NY's governor Andrew Cuomo and other state officials accustomed to being fed election funds to the point of gluttony by the public unions would go absolutely bonkers by the Court's decision stating that workers can't be forced to join unions or pay union dues.  A third party is no party at all, it turns out.

No, I'm not all in on the right's wins, but as July 4 approaches I feel a lot better about the country than I did under eight years of the refreshingly now (mostly) silent Obama.