Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Violence Is Violence!

It was suppose to be a day of celebration. 
It became a day of tragedy.
By now you all know the events that occurred in Boston yesterday. 
Two explosions…seconds apart.  Three dead…over 140 injured. 
Martin Richard was eight years old.  He had just re-joined his mother and sister after hugging his dad at the finish line of the iconic Boston Marathon.  Suddenly a massive explosion tore through the crowd.  Martin Richard died.  His sister lost a leg.  His mother remains in critical condition. 
Lives lost…families shattered…all in a matter of seconds.
The media swarms.  Speculation runs wild.  Conspiracy theories abound. 
 Who did this?  Was it Al Qaeda?  Was it Hezbollah?   Was it a terrorist group or someone operating alone? Are their roots in the Middle East…or in the Midwest? 
“What we DON’T know right now is far more than we DO know.”
The president addresses the nation.  He utters the phrase that we have come to know by heart: 
“We will find those responsible and we will bring them to justice.”
We will react…quickly.  Security will immediately be tightened.  Police presence in public places will become increasingly more obvious.  We will scrutinize what happened and we make every effort to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again.
At the risk of being crucified for politicizing this horrific event we have to ask:  “Why?”
Why does it take a massacre like this, like 911, like Sandy Hook to bring our collective conscience to bear on the violent society in which we live?  Every single day innocent families just like Martin Richard’s are shattered by gun violence…over 2,500 since Sandy Hook.  Are their lives any less notable than Martin’s?  Are their tragedies any less horrific?
Our elected leaders will seek out every media outlet and pose for every camera they can find to condemn the senseless act of violence that occurred in Boston.  Yet they choose to do nothing to curb the gun violence that snuffs the lives of tens of thousands of Americans each year under far less publicized circumstances.
Violence is violence! 
We do everything we can to stop foreign born terrorists from doing us harm.  Yet we do little to halt the violence perpetrated by our own citizens.
Why?       


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