I'll make this quick -- and I admit that maybe I'm being a little optimistic here.
It's always seemed a cop out to me to suggest that violence and hatred are products of fear, but what we're seeing right now seems to prove that assessment pretty handily. The most maniacal among the far right are completely losing their minds these days because they realize that they've lost the country -- and it terrifies them.
A popular black president. Legal gay marriage. A decline in the number of people who call themselves Christian. Talk of acceptance and conciliation toward the Muslim world. The realization that abortion will likely remain legal and the overturning of the ban on stem cell research. The politicians who once obsequiously pandered to the lowest common denominator now marginalized, their party in chaos.
It's all a lot to take.
And so they're fighting back the only way they know how: through violence -- in the case of 88-year-old James Von Brunn, the alleged Holocaust Museum shooter, by making a pathetic attempt to go out in one final blaze of hateful glory by taking down a few of the Jews and blacks who, in his addled mind, were responsible for ruining his life and the future of his beloved white nation before he himself was killed.
But, as with everything else in Von Brunn's long life one would imagine, he failed miserably. Von Brunn succeeded in killing an innocent man, yes -- a black man even. But rather than terrify the intended targets of his wrath and the millions of us whom he believes to be coddling them, he just galvanized his enemy -- making them not only stronger but likely larger as a force. What James Von Brunn, that right wing lunatic of the most inexcusable kind, did today may in fact be the tipping point that leads to a deafening outcry from average people against the forces of hate and ignorance in this country, the ones whose death throes are putting our lives and our way of life in jeopardy.
And the best part: It looks like Von Brunn may live to see the damage he's done to his own cause.
Because as it stands right now, this fucking idiot couldn't even get being a martyr right.
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