Monday, January 24, 2011

Perspective: The Tucson Event

Perspective on The Tucson Event:

We just witnessed how the media of this country and our politicians continue to misinform us. On Saturday January 8th Jared Lee Loughner shot 20 persons, killing six of them... Immediately after the event, however, Paul Klugman, the mainstream media and even Sheriff Clarence Dupnik breathlessly claimed that what caused Loughner to perform this heinous deed was the extreme use of military terms in the political rhetoric expounded by Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sara Palen, the Tea Partiers and the republican right. Within a few short days we learned that his motive was to kill Congresswoman Gabby Giffords to avenge her allegedly slighting him in 2007.

By Thursday, five days after the shooting, everyone who paid attention and could think rationally knew that the root cause of the problem was a mentally ill person who held a grudge against the congresswoman. It unequivocally was not heated political rhetoric. The most logical fit of all the information that has been developed about Loughner is that he is a paranoid schizophrenic.

Forty years ago or so, our nation decided that it was not necessary to institutionalize persons suffering from psychotic disorders. Rather they could be treated with drugs as out patients. We are told that about one percent of the population is schizophrenic. That is 3 million persons. Of these about a third are happy, a third are depressed and a third are angry and confused enough to do serious harm. This means that about one million deranged schizophrenics are probably untreated. Worse a large portion of them are roaming our streets with the homeless. Schizophrenics get no help when they obviously need it. Nothing is done to prevent their doing serious harm while they are in a deranged state of mind, even when irrational behavior typical of the deranged mind is observed. Oh yes, we can do something after they do harm! And they do harm innocent persons over and over again. Have we already forgotten about Columbine and Virginia Tech?

How sad it is that our elite media who were so supportive of the new health care law, wasted so much time on the wrong issue. Instead, the media could have used the event to burn into our brains that we need to take immediate action to treat the mentally deranged. We could have been reminded that the six persons killed, especially the little girl, Christina-Taylor Green, need not have died in vain. In fact the media could have called for a meaningful mental health care program in the name of Christina as part of the public’s wish to fix Obamacare.

An alternative to trying to fix this the problem is to do nothing. The risk that one would be killed in one of these paranoid schizophrenic rampages is about equivalent to being stuck by a lightening bolt. Both are random events.

Finally, as regard heated political rhetoric, do we really think that this is some new malady? Moreover, do we really think that we can change it by adopting Rodney King’s phrase, “Can’t we just get along?” We somehow think that we have only recently become uncivil in this country, and that it is a new phenomenon. Perhaps we have forgotten that our founding fathers had major disputes. If we still taught history as a subject, instead of burying it in Social Studies, perhaps students might recall that the founding fathers had many heated discussions about politics. There were pamphleteers, the “bloggers” of their day, who wrote some nasty stuff. And there were duels, the most famous of which was when Aaron Burr killed Alexander Hamilton. Moreover, military terms such as aim, target, beat, defeat, bulls-eye and the rest have been an integral part of the English language forever.

The problem at the root of the current debate is that we have more government employees than there is revenue from the private sector pay for them. Considering the prospect of increased taxes and shrinking profits, private entrepreneurs are leaving the country in droves, which makes the situation worse. You can bet that the discussion of how to fix this will become heated. The street riots in Greece and some other European countries reflect how government employees probably will react to government program cutbacks.

So, in the meantime to assuage those who feel we must become more careful with our language, what kind of namby pamby language should Politians use to describe their plan to defeat an incumbent? How about, “I am praying that the person I am competing against does not win; please join me in this prayer?”




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