Sunday, August 23, 2009

Guns, Guns and More Guns

After living in D.C. for a long time I grew to hate guns. They give their "owners" a sense of superiority in that they seem to think the gun in and of itself gives them power and makes what they say more "right" and what people like me say more "wrong." A gun does not have that power; but to hear the gun totters - might does make right - true in the sense that it's making the rabid right wingers more right [wing - not correct.]

Frank Rich has a great column today called The Guns of August. He says and quotes:
... the biggest contributor to this resurgence of radicalism remains panic in some precincts about a new era of cultural and demographic change. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it, “What the right as a whole fears is the erosion of its own social position, the collapse of its power, the increasing incomprehensibility of a world — now overwhelmingly technical and complex — that has changed so drastically within a lifetime.”

Bell write that in 1962 - but the Republican party today is in more dire straits - it's become a white southern group of scared persons who do not value public or liberal arts education and who refuse to listen. All they know is how to cause fear and to out shout reason - and the ones who represent them in congress go along with this and give them credence.