Politics

I've written a couple of political-ish posts lately, and here's another one. DH has been going back and forth with a high school friend, once again on Facebook, who is rather conservative. They were pretty civil to each other previously but DH lost it today and went negative, which bothers me. I want all of us to be able to hash out our differences in a civil manner, but when people feel things so passionately I don't know if that's possible. We're all running scared. Conservatives are scared of liberals, liberals are scared of conservatives, Tea Partiers are scared of big government, immigrants, and gays who want to marry, and everyone is scared of the economy, and it's all crashing together in one big sea of emotion.

What's scaring me is the rhetoric that no one is doing anything about. I know we have free speech and all, but isn't there a time when free speech turns into threats and inciting riots? There's this conservative radio talk show host, Joyce Kaufman, here in Florida who stated "if ballots don't work, bullets will" in a speech to a crowd outside of a strip mall. Then, and here's the really frightening part, everyone CHEERED for her. What's wrong with this picture? They cheered when she said to use BULLETS. As in bullets that kill people. What did she mean by that? I'm certainly worried about what she meant by that. If I don't vote the way she wants me to I should be shot? The liberals in our government should be shot? Or should the bullets merely be put out on display somewhere? (Snort.) What? To me that was an open, terrorist threat and this woman should be charged. She was CLEARLY inciting violence and I don't know about you, but I don't think that should be covered as free speech. I'm no lawyer but that just seems so incredibly wrong. The same example, you're not allowed to yell "fire" in a crowded theater, seems to me to apply here. She's yelling "fire", as in "fire your guns if you don't like the way things are going", and that's scary.

Oh, and here's the kicker. She was slated to be the chief of staff for a newly elected tea party congressman. She turned the job down, thank goodness, but the fact that she was even up for consideration is absolutely insane!

See, there I go getting wound up myself, when my intent was to write a nice little post about civil discourse. There's so much more to be said; I don't think this will be my last political-ish post. Now that I've gone there, I think there's no turning back!