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Hate-mongering is like that. We are inundated with hateful memes
on social media, politicians who spout anger without regard for facts, and pundits
who spout more. You have to dig to find unbiased news reporting on much of
anything these days, and that is at least part of the problem.
I firmly believe that most people on both sides really are
good and decent people who are trying to do the best they can every day of
their lives. But the hate-mongering becomes a serious problem when people who
may not be quite as well balanced as they could be fixate on the hateful
rhetoric and end up with a version of events that has nothing whatsoever to do
with reality, and a whole lot to do with hate. And one more time, we have one
more nutcase with a gun.
This is not a one-off. It is unrelenting. Hateful rhetoric has
been spewing from both sides since the shooting. The thing is, violence and
hate-mongering rhetoric have no place in our politics, and there has been too
much of both lately. The January 6th insurrection was about as wrong
on the rhetoric and violence as it could get. The violence toward Nancy Pelosi’s
husband was heinous, and the hateful rhetoric that spewed after it was worse. The
random and methodical mass shootings are to the point of evil. It’s never-ending,
and they have been politicized too. The shooting of our former President Trump
was wrong. Despicably wrong. He survived, but everybody in the crowd didn’t.
Did the country come together in prayer and contemplation?
No, it did not. People spewed hate and conspiracy theory on top of conspiracy
theory, as if that would solve a thing.
Sometimes, just sometimes, folks need to clean their wounds,
cool the rhetoric, and figure out what really happened before bumping up the hate-mongering
one more notch. Although it is still being debated, and the spinners are
spinning for all they are worth, from what we know at this point, the assassination
attempt was made by a member of Trump’s own Republican party. I sure do wish I
had an answer, but nothing makes good common sense. I am not sure out-of-control
hate and violence ever do though. Crazy doesn’t either, and that is what you
get when people who are not that well-balanced end up too wrapped up in all the
political rhetoric and hate-mongering. The hate-mongering feeds the fringes of
both sides, and not in a good way. Be that as it may, there have been times
when I had a pretty good idea that is exactly what some of the politicians intended.
This country needs a good old-fashioned coming to Jesus on all
this hate-mongering and the violence it perpetuates. It needs it bad. The words
of the day used to be love and peace; Now it is hate and violence. People need
to quit feeding into that hate, and they need to vote out the politicians who
fuel it. They are not doing the country or the people in it a lick of good.
We all know folks who would like things a whole lot better
if we only had one or the other political party. However, that is not how this
country was founded. It was founded on the idea that the two parties should work
together and balance things out without going too far in either direction. Now,
instead of working together, a whole lot of the folks in both parties would
just as soon do away with the other completely. That is not how democracy works;
for the folks who like to argue semantics, it is not how a democratic republic works
either. The thing that worries me is that if things don’t start to get better
on this one, they are going to get a whole lot worse. Y’all know that’s true.
Change such as this is a one-person, one-vote at a time
process. We do not have to feed into that hate-mongering. We don’t have to put
up with it either. We really do have the choice to say no to such when we take
our turn in the voting booths on election day. I’m not calling out a single
politician on this one today. Y’all know your districts and you know who the
problems are. Taking it one vote at a time, we can solve this problem in this country.
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