It’s happened again.
It’s happened on multiple fronts in one week.

An attempted church shooting in Kentucky, foiled by locked doors, still results in two dead in a nearby grocery store.
Pipe bombs mailed to prominent Democratic leaders, including 2 former Presidents, and critics of the current “president”. (quotation marks intentional)

And now a massacre by a deluded, angry, bigoted gunman in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, my hometown. I knew it was only a matter of time until this plague of gun violence hit close to home. Way too close. One, and possibly two, of the shooting survivors are people I know.

Our bigot in chief riles up his base. Makes sly comments about violence against those who disagree with him and do not give him the “credit” he believes he deserves. He calls the press “the enemy of the people” and equates desperate migrants fleeing violence in their own countries with an army. He flings words out into the crowds like lit sticks of dynamite and dares them to use them, then claims he did not ask for this action. How can you blame him?

I do blame him.

I blame him for creating the conditions that put one of the kindest, caring people I know in a hospital room fighting for his life. I hope he survives, because the world will be a poorer place without him. I blame our enabler in chief for amplifying the injustice that has caused the deaths of school children, of POC just going about their lives, of people in their place of worship. Each time an attack of this or greater magnitude occurs, those in thrall to the NRA and their contributions say, “now is not the time. Don’t politicize this tragedy.”

But when one tragedy follows on the heels of another, when they pile up like bumper cars at a macabre amusement park, when IS the time? I think the time is now.

Vote like lives depended on it, because they do.

Stop the chaos and VOTE!!!

And now, let there be pandas…

Be the Bear
Bob T Panda