Assassin Johns Wilkes Booth, and Terrorist Timothy McVeigh committed their heinous acts in part because they believed that they would be remembered as heroes of a political movement, and fantasized that their actions would spark the beginning of a revolt and eventual government overthrow. Both were fringe thinkers inspired by hate speech. One was inspired by the Confederate South, the other by the white supremacists movement. As I watch the news of the killings in Arizona today I can't help but wonder if the shooter was similarly inspired, and I fear that the psychotic thread of thinking that has serpentined its way through our Slavery, Confederate, Ku Klux Klan, Nazi, and white supremacists history may now have woven it’s way into a corner the cloth of the very political party that was once elected the president that Johns Wilkes Booth so hated and took from America, Abraham Lincoln.
There are all sorts of talk show hosts, and other holier-than-thou-rabble-rousing people out there wallowing in big bank accounts, with college educations, who prefer to site problems rather than create solutions. Frankly, I'm tired of all the horse pucky. It's time to form a global task force of people who care about one another.
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