~a column by Colleen O’Brien
This sentence above was a 1960’s typing class drill that filled a full line on an 11 by 8 1/2 piece of typing paper* and seems an apt approach to life in these United States right now.
This country is in need of calming down, and the typing drill came to mind after the shooting at Donald Trump at his Saturday, July 13 rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Not just because of the shooting but the virulent reaction against-against-against . . . anything or anybody or somebody who was “behind” it.
Whatever I think of the man, I am grateful he was not hurt badly, thankful that he was not killed. One was.
There is a gun problem in this country, and because of this latest problem resulting from too many guns and too few laws regulating their possession, commentators are repeating each other’s indignation that this kind of violence cannot be tolerated in our politics.
It has been tolerated in our kindergartens, gay clubs, outdoor music venues, grocery stores, churches for a couple of decades.
It has been tolerated against LGBTQIAs, Blacks, women, Muslims, Hispanics, Latinx, Semites, students, judges, prosecutors, jurors, other politicians . . . .
Maybe this time, because of the high dudgeon and outrage over an ex-president of our country being targeted for extinction, there will be calm thinking followed by commonsense legislation to insist on gun laws to protect people rather than gun owners: background checks to acquire a license to buy, banning the sale of high capacity magazines, banning the sale of semi-automatic weapons, increasing mental health funding, and cancelling the Supreme Court’s latest decision, which is to allow the sale of bump stocks.
And along with that, would it be an impossibility, a pipe dream, a miracle for a ban against an insistence on retaliation, spitefulness, retribution, bullying, verbal outrage, all of which in this era as often as not leads to shooting anyone at will?
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An ironic fact about the line of all good men . . . is how it first read, which was . . . come to the aid of their party.
This has been the increasingly serious problem in the U.S. for the last decade. Now is the time for all good men to stuff their party in their hind pocket and come to the aid of their country.
* . . . along with this sentence – ‘The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ — which contains all the letters of the alphabet, thus a good practice for budding typists, and has no reason to be in this column other than its factoidness.
