Special Comment By Teh Keith

[filkertom]

On our toxic discourse, and the unacceptability of violence. And I invoke his last lines, and I will do my best to stand by them:

Violence, or the threat of violence, has no place in our Democracy, and I apologize for and repudiate any act or any thing in my past that may have even inadvertently encouraged violence. Because for whatever else each of us may be, we all are Americans.

Comments

[kilbia.livejournal.com]

I will acknowledge and concede that politics alone is not likely to have driven this man to brain imbalance. I have no problem believing that if he hadn't been inspired by the political environment, he would have been a mere footnote in the news, state-level if he were lucky, as some random mall or school shooting.

However, what I am personally upset about is not that it happened, but that so many people in the Republican party, in their attempt to connect with what they perceive as a populist movement and to "stir men's hearts and minds to mutiny", have used violence as metaphor and refused to acknowledge that their choice of words might have influenced this man's choice of target.

(This anger increases exponentially if any of the hand-wringing apologists have ever moved or voted to ban or restrict access to any type of book, music, game or art on the grounds that "impressionable people might get the wrong message". I have no proof that any of the individuals in question *have* done so; it's just that hypocrisy is a rage trigger for me.)

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I can thoroughly understand anger at hypocrisy - if you are going to claim right to restrict material because of "impressionable minds", then certainly you have to walk the walk.

Other than that, though, I don't see why influencing the man's target is an issue. If someone was going to die, we'd still have a dead person. The death of a congresswoman is tragic, but not any more so than, say, the death of a mom dedicated to her kids. In the end, the worms don't care what you did for a living.