Odd Critters
POST 1107
Odd Humans
See note #5 below
Upon seeing him on Bill Maher’s program on September 27, I remembered that Yuval Noah Harari is a favorite author of Barack Obama. I just ordered Harari’s book Sapiens and hope to find a little understanding about humans from those pages.
My non-scientific, anecdotal observation is that for most of we humans, upon learning of the suffering of others, we first translate that into how we would feel were we suffering in that way. That probably isn’t true of a mother responding to a crying baby, but it likely is true when we hear about the Gazans today. We see the suffering people and do an automatic, “What if that were me or someone I love?” We bypass simple empathy for those actually suffering in the moment and make it about ourselves, a “me thing.”
Feel free to push back on this and perhaps we’ll all learn something valuable. But if there is any validity to my observation, then, for example, that lack of simple empathy may well be part of why our political insanity makes it impossible to create what are called “common sense gun safety laws.” The cruel irony, of course, is the absence of any common sense.
I just don’t see any common sense in our allowing our citizens to own AR-15s or bump stocks or large capacity magazines. It makes no sense for an 18-year-old, years from having a mature brain that can fully anticipate consequences and for whom risk is just an exercise in excitement to have the right to purchase weapons of war. But we let this insanity – this total lack of common sense – go on, as our legislators suck up to the firearms industry in order to get campaign contributions. And then we reelect them! That’s insane.
When the awful shooting occurred – any shooting – did you feel affected? If you lived in Nerwtown, CT (Sandy Hook Elementary School) you did. Same for Highland Park, IL on the 4th of July two years ago and all the others when it’s close to home. We automatically identify when the threat feels near.
I’m feeling that way now because two of my grandchildren are in college, in different schools, and each had a shooting nearby them, one on and the other just off campus. That’s really close to the heart for me. But it’s likely you didn’t even hear about those shootings because we have two mass shootings every three days and lots more single shootings in this shooting gallery of a country. Most of the attention to them fades away quickly, covered only by local news and even then only for a day or two. Then the journalists are off to cover the next brutal event.
My grandchildren are okay, thanks for asking, but I am not. My fire is stoked once again to a roaring inferno over our insane refusal to protect our own people until the blood is flowing close to home. And even then we do nothing to prevent the next massacre, just like the days following the Sandy Hook slaughter of first graders, when we did nothing but offer impotent, cowardly and offensive “thoughts and prayers.”
If you need to feel that fire in order to understand and to take action, just imagine that those were your children or grandchildren being just a short distance from that campus gunfire. Imagine if they had to “shelter in place,” hiding in their dorm rooms as the murderer was hunted down. Imagine them at last able to leave their dorms, walk outside and realize how terribly exposed and at risk they are all the time. Do you feel that fire now?
No matter where it happens and whether we feel it or not, it’s always close to home for someone or it will be soon. Do we only care after the fact, or are we willing to go on the hunt to recapture some common sense? Our election in 29 days seems like a good time to gather our wits about us and elect people who we believe have common sense. Check March For Our Lives first, then Everytown For Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action. Get involved – before you’re ordered to shelter in place.
About that about “me thing” – it likely doesn’t even register that there is an ongoing civil war in Sudan and many thousands of people are starving because we Americans pretty much don’t identify with the Sudanese. So, like I said, if it isn’t us and it isn’t close to home, it doesn’t register.
We really are odd critters.
Biggest Idiot of the Month
Speaking of odd critters, as the winds and rain of hurricane Helene were rapidly ramping up, the governors of most of our southeastern states mobilized their emergency teams and national guard units. They put all citizens on alert and called DC asking for a declaration of emergency to get help from FEMA as fast as possible. All of them did that – except one.
Republican Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee took a different approach to dealing with that monster hurricane. He refused to reach out to our federal agencies for the help the people in his state would soon desperately need. He made no request for a declaration of emergency for Tennessee. Instead, Gov. Lee called for a “voluntary day of prayer and fasting.”
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Yes, really!
He didn’t ask for FEMA help until flash floods were drowning entire towns and cities in his state. Of course, President Biden approved the request immediately.
If they could talk, I bet the people in Tennessee who died in that monster storm would have something to say to Gov. Lee about his official state response of prayer and fasting, when food, water and boots on the flooded ground would be so terribly and obviously needed. He’s weird in a “beating drums in the jungle” kind of way and as a result has lost the support of his dead Bible thumping constituents – perhaps some live ones, too.
Congratulations go to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee for being the Biggest Idiot in September.
It’s not the vibes and it’s not the polls: it’s the votes.
Are you registered to vote? Check it out on any of these websites:
https://www.vote.org/am-i-registerilled-to-vote/
https://www.usa.gov/confirm-voter-registration
https://www.rockthevote.org/how-to-vote/am-i-registered-to-vote/
“Friends do not let friends vote for con artists.”
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– Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 2016
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