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Despite the late October pummeling of the Northeastern US by Hurricane/Superstorm Sandy, 2012 ended not with series of world-ending disasters, but with a single, tragic event that rocked us to our core: the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.
It wasn't the only massacre of the year perpetrated by a damaged young man; similar stories played out at a movie theater in Colorado, a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, a mall in Oregon and on a smaller scale all across the country as American opened holes in other Americans with tools specifically designed for that purpose -- exactly as their manufacturers, and the powerful lobbying group that represents those manufacturers, intended.
2012 may be the year the tide turned and we collectively said, enough is e-fucking-nough loud enough for even our craven, dimwitted, and beholden elected officials to hear. Well, the dimwits (we'll use Louis Gohmert as the poster boy for this crowd, though he's got plenty of comrades-in-arms, as it were) clearly didn't hear; they're still out there arguing against evidence and reason that the answer to our ongoing crisis of gun violence is more guns, everywhere, and with minimal accountability because the Gohmerts of the world are profoundly ignorant, morally retarded, and unaccountable for their simple-minded bloodlust.
Trayvon Martin was also gunned down earlier this year courtesy of Florida's (insane) Stand Your Ground law as practiced by a chickenshit grown man who was so terrified of a kid in a hoodie with some Skittles in his pocket that he felt his only recourse was to open fire on the unarmed teen after harassing him.
How many other people died of gunshot wounds this year? Is it in the the thousands? How many died in accidental and negligent discharges where there was no malice or forethought? (And why is it so hard to get data?) It's certainly more than the number of people who successfully defended themselves or their property with a firearm, which will come as a big surprise to a few of my old high school buddies -- the ones suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome peppering my timeline with cherry-picked stories of heroic gunslingers.
How many other people died of gunshot wounds this year? Is it in the the thousands? How many died in accidental and negligent discharges where there was no malice or forethought? (And why is it so hard to get data?) It's certainly more than the number of people who successfully defended themselves or their property with a firearm, which will come as a big surprise to a few of my old high school buddies -- the ones suffering from Obama Derangement Syndrome peppering my timeline with cherry-picked stories of heroic gunslingers.
I scanned my list of posts for the year and the one that was most viewed also happened to be a tragic story of a shooting death, one of the accidental/negligent variety -- one I bet you couldn't name the victim in. She was Hannah Kelly. Ring a bell? No? Well, she's the young lady who was shot and killed in church because her fiancée was trying to buy a gun there and it accidentally went off during the transaction. Her father, by the way, is the pastor of the church where the incident happened. And still, when tragedies like these occur, some of the loudest voices are those of relentless sociopaths with theocratic dreams blaming secularism for their imaginary (sociopathic) deity's judgment on the victims.
We had a Presidential election this year, but the outcome was never really in doubt (to anyone paying attention and not enthralled by the blinkered ideology of the oligarchy) and the outcome probably only mattered because it means there is less chance incompetent ideologues will be appointed to life terms on the Supreme Court than would have been otherwise.
We may look back and remember there was a fever dream of a scandal about the attack on our embassy in Benghazi. The real story was the death of our people over there and how slipshod our defenses were, thanks in large part to those same Republicans who hypocritically railed against the administration after voting against the proper funding of embassy security.
The ongoing saga of the Republican party's inability to restrain and contain it's darkest, most misogynistic tendencies as expressed by the troglodytes they couldn't muzzle fast enough will need to be remembered, because that's by no means done playing out.
The ongoing saga of the Republican party's inability to restrain and contain it's darkest, most misogynistic tendencies as expressed by the troglodytes they couldn't muzzle fast enough will need to be remembered, because that's by no means done playing out.
Our LGBT friends and family won on some fronts, lost on others, but on the whole it looks like we past a tipping point and our better natures are starting to recognize the humanity and rights of what had been one of the last minority groups it was still socially acceptable to openly hate and discriminate against. Here in North Carolina, the reactionary, bigoted, and fearful element of society managed to enshrine their hatred in our state's constitution by winning the battle over Amendment One, but the rest of can take heart by looking around the country and seeing more progressive states moving forward.
Divided, ridden with bullet holes, facing the sacrifice of the financial security of working people on the altar of continued tax cuts for the wealthy the American body politic staggers forward. I'm reminded of Taco, when I think of us as a collective, performing a suicide scrote before Rafi (the embodiment of the American Conservative movement) can cock-punch us himself.
2012, you made me feel like Ruxin ...
After writing this and creating my timeline, someone set a house on fire and then shot at and killed two firefighters who responded to the blaze. I don't want to sink any more time into that graphic, but I'll remember next year to wait before saving ... and to make it the right size in the first place.
2012, you made me feel like Ruxin ...
After writing this and creating my timeline, someone set a house on fire and then shot at and killed two firefighters who responded to the blaze. I don't want to sink any more time into that graphic, but I'll remember next year to wait before saving ... and to make it the right size in the first place.