Day 22

When I think about what happened to Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona the day that when she went out doing her job as a political figure by trying to reach out to the people that both voted for her and those that did not vote for her it makes my blood boil.  She was born 43 years ago today and to me is still a young woman that had great potential taken away from her.  When that gunman came to that meet and greets and opened fire on her and the other people that were killed and injured by the bullets in his gun it was far beyond a criminal act.  Loughner was very much a disturbed man to me that was egged on by the ranting of Sarah Palin.  Palin put cross hairs on an electoral map and marked her for killing by the disturbed man.  When speaking to a national audience the use of this kind of ideas in association with a public figure as a target to me rises to the level of being a criminal act.  If you stand in a crowded room and shout fire when there is no fire and in the panic of people trying to escape the non existent fire are injured or even killed to me the speaker with the frightening untrue words is a murderer.  We have had a discussion nationally about this and there are those that say that this disturbed man hated all politicians not just Democrats.  To this I say fine but when you speak to an audience you must take into consideration the possible condition of the mental state of the people that you’re talking to.  Let’s just say that maybe Sarah Palin just planted the thought that Gabby Giffords needed to be a target.  We all know what a cross hair is from childhood cartoons that used them to point ant their cartoon foes.  To me a cross hair is only used as a gun shooting device to make sure that what you’re trying to hit is going to have the bullet reach its mark.  Once this foul disturbed man had done the deed of shooting all those people and we knew the results of the target shooting that Sarah Palin wanted to see her people complete we saw a whole lot of back peddling on the part of Sarah Palin.  Claiming that she never intended for Gabby to be shot at all.  Problem is when you do not think about consequences of your actions until it is too late to change things it’s just too late to make it good.  I think that even a child would tell you that if you put a symbol of a target on something it means that you want that animal or thing or person to be shot at.  If I would have been one of her advisors I would have been able to see the potential for this problem to occur but I was not asked to advise her.  Politicians in general surround themselves with yes people and only tell them just exactly what they want to hear.  Similar to what happened in the last election when Mitt Romney was stunned by the huge loss he took.  Fox news was in a way being his yes man by telling people the lies that the poles were wrong and that Mitt was ahead.  The half hearted apology that Sarah Palin gave to the victims of the shootings was not heart felt in my opinion and there was to me this underlying feeling that she was glad that this had happened and did not regret it at all.  When we resort to the use of guns to resolve our political differences you have to know that we are in very big trouble in our country.  We have herd from the far right that they want a war to resolve our conflict with each other.  They have no idea of the terror of war and the reality of fighting one on our own land.  If this were to happen today with the weapons that we have available to us now verses what we had in the civil war we would make the civil war look like a picnic.  People that speak in public to me need to be held accountable for what they say and what happens after they say it.  To me freedom of your speech ends where my rights start.  It is a line that may be hard to determine at times but I feel that Sarah Palin more then crossed over that line when she put a target on Gabby Giffords.