2011-01-08

The Arizona shooting - Is this America's wake-up call?

I may be reading too much into the Arizona shooting today, where a nine year old girl, a Judge, and others died and wounded by gunshots from a deranged 22-year old, while a US House of Representative lay in hospital in critical condition from a gun shot to the head at point blank range. You (the reader) and I offer our condolences to all the families of the victims shot today by Jared Lee Loughner at an outside Safeway Grocery store townhall meeting in Tucson Arizona set up by active U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona. Loughner's motive is yet unknown.

My read is the Political climate has returned to the hate level where it was in the 1960's and early 1970's following the assassignations of President John F. Kennedy and NAACP's Medgar Wiley Evers. Even without the fatal shooting in the Republican-dominated Tucson district, attitudes of millions of American citizens lean toward a hateful panic rapidly spreading since the 2009 Presidential Inauguration of our President Barack Obama.

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.. In 2006, she became Arizona's first Jewish representative (photo by Reuters)
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We are yet to know the motive of Mr. Loughner, but in the recent past, Rep. Giffords had to shut her office down due to vandalism after he supportive vote of the passed Health Care Bill backed by President Obama in 2010. It is confirmed that Longhner attended a Giffords rally before and she did not answer his question. Longhner may have ties to anti-Semitic, anti-immigration hate group American Renaissance, according to a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security.

Arizona Representative Giffords, is a blue-dog conservative Democrat, representing a majority Replublican Arizona district. Arizona vigoriously dealt in 2010 with State versus Federal rights in regards to Immigration, and the State was last in the "Union" to recognize Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday in the 1990's.

Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dubnik in the Press Conference tonight about the Tucson shooting, and he referred to his State of Arizona as the "Mecca of prejudice and bigotry". Dubnik further stated that "this is a sad day in America.." "It's time to do a little soul searching about the rhetoric we hear on the radio, how our children are being raised," he added..
The Nations' negative political climate on the airwaves is purposely edgy. The openness of racism against the President daily by talk show hosts on National News Cable Television and Radio Talk Programs has Civil Rights leaders currently quesitoning the Federal Communication Commission's enforcment of its' decency policy.

Just this past Thursday, the President was the source of a disrespectful outburst, just a year after another outburst from a South Carolina Representative at the US Capitol. While Representative Frank Pallone read this portion of the Constitution Thursday: "No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President", a birther citizen named Theresa yelled out "Except Barack Obama." A year ago January 2010, South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson called the President "a liar" (video below) during the President's State of the Union address.


Protests in our country have exhibited signs about our President as a "Socialist" and a "Hitler" mustache painted on President Obama's protrait. In 2010 African-American Congressmen have been called the N-Word at a Capitol Hill protest. These are just a few more negative examples that we often see during the first two years of the Obama Presidency.

Are these events, including today's Arizona shooting, signs of more bad times to come, as the 1963 shootings of President Kennedy and NAACP's Medger Evers was for the 1960's?

While we have not yet figured out the motive of the Tuscon mass-murders, the facts are that Democratic U.S. Representative Giffords narrowly defeated a Republican Tea Party candidate in the recent November election. Representative Giffords in 2010 had to get extra security for vandalism of her office following her approving vote for the 2010 Health Care plan supported by the President. And ten Democrats expressed concern for their safety after receiving anonymous phone threats for their support of the same 2010 Health Reform bill.

Ironic at this time, the new Republican-majority House formally approved the rules for debate on the Health Law Repeal, though -- due to today's shooting -- the actual vote on the Health Care Repeal is delayed. The procedural debate measure passed largely along party lines on a 236-181 vote.

Maybe the Tucson shooter today was attempting to gain attention and this massacre was not a political assassignation attempted of U.S. House Representative Giffords. But we have to question the current climate of both Arizona and America as a whole, where a person now feels "compelled and comfortable" shooting people in a political public fact-finding forum.

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