Spare Me the Sanctimony

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

We live in mean, angry times, and violence seems to have become a staple of American society.  Why waste time discussing your concerns with family members, friends, a counselor or a minister, when you can just pull an automatic weapon out of the closet and make a public statement that will resonate through the pages of history.

Violence, and especially gun violence, is wrong and it's evil, but as long as every troubled and angry young man in this country has ready access to weapons of war, there will be blood in the streets, and classrooms, and on the public stages.

I wasn't going to comment on the political shooting in Pennsylvania last Saturday because I had nothing to add to the conversation.  The United States is a diverse political nation, and of late our political differences seem to have polarized the population.  But we address those political differences, regardless of how extreme they become, through democratic processes like campaigns and elections, and not by making politicians, the message-carriers, pop-up targets in a shooting gallery.

Politically I am not a fan of Mr. Trump, but I am very thankful that he was not injured more seriously in the attack on Saturday.  We are the United States of America - and not some third-rate, banana republic.  We use ballots to resolve our differences, not bullets.

That was how I saw the situation, and others, of course saw it differently.  Some tried to make it political and blame it on the national press or the other political party for stirring anger against their candidate, and still others were quick to involve God.

Sunday morning church services across the nation apparently saw throngs of Christian ministers rushing to praise God for interceding in the shooting and saving Donald Trump from more serious injury or death.  Trump had been saved by "divine intervention."  God had somehow reached down from Heaven and nudged that bullet just enough to keep it from hitting its intended target, the head of the candidate.  I didn't watch the Republican Convention last night, but news reports indicate there was "divine intervention" talk bouncing around there as well.

One is left to wonder why God only intervened with Trump.  Why didn't God also slap down the bullet that killed the retired fireman who was at the rally with his family?  The fireman was there cheering on Trump.  Why did God overlook him?  And how about the other two people attending the rally who were critically wounded?  What was the all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful God doing while they were stopping bullets with their bodies?

And why wasn't God kicking down the classroom door in Sandy Hook in 2012 and protecting those 20 first-graders who were savagely gunned down and killed by a 20-year-old monster.  Surely to God those precious six-and-seven-year-olds were deserving of some divine intervention!   Was that God's day off?

Or what about the 19 fourth-graders who were slaughtered in their classroom in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022 when an 18-year-old opened fire on them with an automatic rifle?  Why the hell wasn't God intervening then?  Or on Valentine's Day in Parkland, Florida, in 2018 when a 19-year-old with an automatic weapon gunned down 14 high school students.  God was AWOL then, too!

And then there were the thousands of children who have starved to death or been otherwise brutally murdered in Gaza.   Was the ultimate peace delivered through death their divine intervention?

One man died at a rally on Saturday while another man lived - and two more lives hang in the balance. The fates of each of them and of countless others may have been the result something as insignificant as a shift in the breeze, a bird squawking, a fly landing on the shooter's nose, or a muscle spasm.  Who knows?  

It was a shooting, the American bloodsport.   One man lived and another died.   There was no intervention, divine or otherwise.

God didn't have a hand in it.  God avoids shootings.

Spare me your sanctimony.