I'd feel remiss if I didn't talk about the shootings in Tucson, Arizona. As a young child, Tucson and Albuquerque were right up there with Los Angeles as favorite vacation stops where people lived who I loved to see. And that continued for some time, with an uncle who retired there after spending his life in Duluth. And my Dad lived in Phoenix, not far away by the standards of folks living in that part of the country.
A senseless shooting. And we have political and other pundits pushing their "magic pill" solutions as if they were going to change anything. And, someone pointed out the crosshair graphics on one of Sarah Palin's web site. And Sarah Palin (whom I and a couple of others refer to as "the Paris Hilton of American politics") is calling that "blood libel". And what's strange is that both sides of that particular argument don't recognize their own fallacies! On the one hand, it would be a rare and exceptional case for someone to go on a shooting rampage because of one web site with crosshairs. But I would like to point out to Sarah and anyone else willing to listen that while one web site's graphics can be called one drop in a bucket, it needs to be recognized that if you find a full bucket, the bucket is full of drops!
President Obama went far beyond the "magic pills" of the various pundits and described what we need, and he did so in terms that most of us can remember understanding as children. And if we dissect the opposite and how that can happen, and if we look at what caused times to be good in the past, then we can see what needs to be done. Many will claim it to be difficult, but to folks like you and me, it can be much closer than people think.
So, why not let's see it come to be. And if the two parts can match and stay matching for a very, very long time.
