The massacre “makes us think about violence in this society,” Barack Obama told a campaign rally in Milwaukee. Then he describes “a lot of different forms of violence in our society, and so much of it is rooted in our incapacity to recognize ourselves in each other.” The switch is on; now it can be used for politics.
“I hope,” the candidate says, “that it causes us to reflect a little more broadly on the degree to which we do accept violence in various forms all the time in our society: we glorify it, we encourage it, we ignore it, and it’s heartbreaking.” You get that? Some nut perpetrates the greatest shooting massacre in the nation’s history, and we’re supposed to “reflect” on “violence in various forms” that we’re responsible for? People are gathered in candlelight vigils across the nation, or are crying on each other’s shoulders in Blacksburg, or tensely waiting in hospitals, and this character wants to put the national nose in a corner to “think about it” ? which he obviously is not doing, or else he wouldn’t be so callous and mercantile.
So what other forms of violence are there that Obama says “we’re going to have to think about”? Well, “[i]t’s not necessarily physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways.” Yeah, here it comes:
Last week, the big news obviously had to do with Imus, and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters. … There’s the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country, they’ve lost their job and they’ve lost their pension benefits and they’ve lost their healthcare, and they’re having to compete against their teenage children for jobs at the local fast-food place paying $7 an hour. There is the violence of children whose voices are not heard in communities that are ignored, who don’t have access to a decent education, who are surrounded by drugs and crime, and a lack of hope. So there’s a lot of different forms of violence in our society …
By the same token, there’s the “violence” of socialists who immediately seek to capitalize on the deaths of innocent college students, making a disgusting analogy of hate speech, protectionism, healthcare, minimum wage, education, “hope,” etc. to real, horrific violence.
