Whigs, Dodos and High Button Shoes

Some days I am not in the mood to write a Blog post and then a headline, comment, column or something will catch my eye and I head for my laptop.

Today is such a day.

Yesterday (12/2/2015) in California, 14 people were massacred and the last count that I saw 20 were injured. 

There was also another shooting in this country on that date.  1 woman was killed and 3 men were injured in Savannah, GA.  I found out about that massacre (we now define “massacre” according to our do nothing congress, as a shooting that results in 3 or more deaths) from an article posted on Facebook today.

I received countless emails and notifications from several news organizations about California. Not one about Georgia.  Too small? Too much like all of the others? How many of us have to die before there is a notification or email. How many of us have to die before the massacre becomes a commercial free event on our 24-hour cable stations?

California was the 3^rd “mass shooting” since the Colorado Springs massacre.

I would guess that because of the number of dead and the location of the shootings, the coverage was constant.

Savannah received a 3 paragraph statement on the website of one of its TV stations.

Research by a Reddit community and others show that there have 355 mass shootings in the US this year.  That means we have had more multiple death and injured shootings than days in the year.

We are living in a time in which when we wake up in the morning, there is a possibility that we could be injured or killed by a lunatic with a gun.  A gun that even those on the terrorist watch list can buy because Congress is beholden to the NRA and gun manufacturers and not to us the American people.

We are also living in a time when the media has failed us completely. Listening to some of the junk being spewed yesterday on TV was enough to make my head hurt, but not enough for me to want to write a Post.  That desire was prompted by an email I received this morning from the Washington Post.  In the Politics email that I receive every day, the article with the headline “Obama’s inconsistent claim on the ‘frequency’ of mass shootings in the U.S. compared to other countries” did that. The first paragraph read “We urge the president to be consistent in [sic] precise in describing mass shootings in the U.S.”

At least 15 people died, 23 are injured in 1 day in 2 different shootings in 2 different parts of the country and the writer was given a platform to criticize the President’s use of words, as he compared our gun crazy society to other nations that are not war torn, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria etc.

We, the people of the United States have no one advocating for our needs.

We have a Congress, which is peopled by the serfs of the wealthy.

We have a media, which for the most part is wholly owned by the wealthy.

We have police departments that seem to be less caring and are more racists that the KKK.

We had the Occupy movement and now Black Lives Matter, which we do not support and so they are attacked and demonized by politicians and the media.

We have a planet that is dying and those who worship the checkbook of the Koch Brothers are withholding life support.

If we do not wake up, stand up and say no more, we will all join the Whigs and the Dodo.

We will be no more.

Chart below by Wonkblog.