A friend of mine, tonight on Social Media, asked the question, ‘what more can we do?’
By rights, the image above shouldn’t have our flag; the image shouldn’t have only the recent deaths in America. By rights, the image should remember every act of terrorism that has occurred in the world, in 2017.
I honestly don’t know what more we can do.
I believe that when America decides that a problem is best solved with a bomb, a gun, a weapon of some sort—and we are experts at trying to solve problems with guns—we give an example for the world, that violence is the way to stop violence.
Ronald Reagan’s January 11, 1989, farewell speech to the nation, echoed the words of John Winthrop, in a sermon from 1630:
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
I was 37 when I heard this speech; a husband, the father of three children, working for the City of Portland. I had been raised in the ‘church’ of the American Legion; the only God I had been raised with was in the phrase ‘God and Country.’ I had since come to know the Creator; and I believed that our country had been blessed with tremendous prosperity, and we owed it to the nations of the world to share our prosperity. We owed it to the nations of the world to be a shining example of those words uttered by President Reagan, and by President Kennedy, before him. Similar words spoken by so many Presidents that followed.
The life of an illustrator requires the pursuit of research, historical research, if one is illustrating historical subjects. The more historical research I did, clearer it became that the truth was that the US Government did a pretty shitty job of living up to those words. Most of that excrement was hidden for a very long time. We played the hypocrite until we finally elected a President that didn’t make the slightest effort to live up to any of those words. His ‘leadership’ makes a mockery of the words of the Presidents before him; and he blames others when his bad decisions are discovered.
America has presented itself, for a century, that we are the example the world should live up to. Look at the example we have become.
Less than 55% of the voters in America bothered to vote in the Presidential Election of 2016. Of those that voted, 46% voted for the President; 48% voted for the Democratic candidate. One-quarter of the country voted for FEAR [False Evidence Appearing Real]; and FEAR won the election. The winner of that election has been spouting on about Fake News for so long, that many of the voters of America don’t even pay attention to politics anymore.
Every time we attempt to solve the internal problems of other nations by the use of weapons of mass destruction [including automatic weapons], we tell the world that this is how problems should be solved. We are the example…377 Mass Shootings this year; day 309 of this year.
Jesus wept.
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Chronicles in Ordinary Time 