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Well, what do you think?
I guess the big thing that we’ll be thinking about for the next few days to a week is the Dallas shooting.
Just before 9 PM last night Afghanistan war veteran Micah Johnson went on a shooting rampage and killed 5 police officers.
Before Johnson was killed with a bomb of some sort that police sent in to do the job, he complained about the Black Lives Matter movement, and that he wanted to kill white people, especially police officers.
There are three more people being detained and this story will unfold a lot more.
I guess the big thing that we’ll be thinking about for the next few days to a week is the Dallas shooting.
Just before 9 PM last night Afghanistan war veteran Micah Johnson went on a shooting rampage and killed 5 police officers.
Before Johnson was killed with a bomb of some sort that police sent in to do the job, he complained about the Black Lives Matter movement, and that he wanted to kill white people, especially police officers.
There are three more people being detained and this story will unfold a lot more.
The corporate media loves stories like this because it keeps people glued to the TV…and the 3 to 4 minutes of commercials that come up four times an hour or so.
It’s high ratings and large corporations can sell more stuff that Americans don’t really need, but have been led to believe they want.
Media circus is often the term we use, and for our corporate media – why don’t we just call them paparazzi? – this is the money time.
Makes a lot of people sick.
Oh, I’m sure we’ll blame guns for this, maybe race relations.
To me the answer is clear – poverty.
We have poverty of the soul and poverty in our economy.
People feel worthless and hopeless and the mind-numbing and virtually useless jobs and professions aren’t making them feel better, or valuable to society.
What’s especially bad is that we continually wage war across the globe, creating more and more veterans that we promise we’ll take care of but then never do.
They come home to a country that doesn’t care about them, struggle with emotional issues, and have trouble finding and keeping jobs.
I really don’t know how the situation between our returning Afghan veterans is any different than it was for our returning Vietnam veterans except instead of getting spit on at the airport there might be an old lady waiting to hug you.
Other than that, we don’t care.
I bet this man Micah Johnson didn’t really feel like his country cared about him, even though he’d fought for it.
He’s black and it seems to me that he was probably affected by these two terrible police killings in Minnesota and Louisiana this week.
LK had some good comments on ID today and I think he’s right on many points.
“It’s not OK for cops to murder innocent people,” he says. “Now, the people are fighting back. The cops should have policed their own before we got to this point. The result? Dallas.”
Pretty harsh words, but there’s some truth in there.
Later on he says that our current system is set up to identify and fine people so we can take money they don’t have.
I believe there’s some truth in that.
We have a nation of poor souls out there and they’re not feeling part of this country anymore, if they ever did feel that way.
We could talk about the incredibly unequal distribution of wealth in this country, the low and stagnant wages, or how much our politicians are paid on top of what they take from corporations on the side and during ‘election time’…which is year-round.
It’s sad, sad this emptiness in our souls. It’s destroying this country and I fully expect we’ll bicker about the issues that don’t matter over the next few days and week, not the issues that do.
I’ll leave you with this quote from the Bible’s Book of Malachi. It’s a good one, written by an unknown person sometime between 500 and 450 BC.
He had a high regard for the well-off priestly caste of society, though he didn’t much like it when they began to think better of themselves than those they were supposed to look after.
Here it is, from Malachi 1,2:
“And now, O priests, this command is for you. If you will not listen, if you will not lay it to heard to give glory to my name, says the Lord of hosts, then I will send the curse on you and I will curse your blessings; indeed I have already cursed them, because you do not lay it to heart. I will rebuke your offspring, and spread dung on your faces, the dung of your offerings, and I will put you out of my presence.”
