Congresswoman Giffords (D-AZ) shot

I don't know what to say exactly about the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others with her today. There isn't much really to say that isn't already common sense: the shooting was a terrible travesty, an unnecessary display of cowardice by a man that most likely disagreed politically with the Congresswoman's views.

As I write this, Giffords is in surgery fighting for her life. It should never have come to this. If a man disagrees politically with his representative, violence is ALWAYS the wrong route to take.

The political climate in this country is making a very minute -- but very radical -- population crazy, acting out in violent ways in attempts to "take this country back." Assassination plots against then-candidate Barack Obama; an attack made at the Holocaust Museum in D.C. perpetrated by a white supremacist; violence in Unitarian churches based on the political ideology its members hold; an assassination of an abortion clinic doctor by a right-wing radical; and now the shooting of a Congresswoman in Arizona.

Words cannot express how I feel about this. Violence isn't necessary except in extreme situations; and the world we live in today, the political conditions we now face, certainly don't require them at all. Bobby Kennedy said it best, speaking about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., when he said the following:

The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one -- no matter where he lives or what he does -- can be certain who will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.

Why? What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet.

No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled, uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of reason. (Emphasis added)

We seem to lose sight, sometimes, of that underlined section above, that we are all human beings. When we forget that, we act out in violent ways, disregarding the lives of others in favor of our own opinions and own ideas of how our world should be run.

Reject this violence, as other lawmakers, both right and left, already have.

...this much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.