Sunday, July 14, 2024

Shootings, Hate-Mongering, and Political Violence

By Regina Pickett

I'm troubled by the shooting of our former President Trump, and I know that I am not the only one. It’s not just the shooting. The hate-mongering rhetoric that spews from both political sides in this country, and sometimes from outside it, has been troubling for a while. At a certain point, it overflows. We are at that point. People get violent. Others die and suffer injury.

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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