"The Enemy of the American People"
So" Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks it would be a good idea for third- and fourth-grade kids across the country to carry semiautomatic weapons and keep them in their classrooms in case they need to fire back if a shooter bursts in? And that would make those children and their teachers safer? There's no chance that any of them might ever get into a fight with a classmate and shoot him or her (or them)? No child would fire a gun accidentally, killing or wounding someone else? No emotionally upset children would turn those weapons on themselves? Even for Greene, who has a long record of espousing nutty conspiracy theories, the idea that elementary-grade students could have access to guns at school should be considered an astoundingly delusional piece of thinking.
That and the record of Greene's comments on school shootings, not to speak of so many other issues, are disturbing -- and not just for what they tell us about one elected official. Far more troubling is what that record reflects about the broader state of this country's political discourse at a time when one side in our ongoing arguments regularly promotes false reasoning, invented or distorted facts, and a lack of human sympathy except when it fits a partisan interest.
Greene is certainly an extreme example of that trend. However, she's anything but one of a kind. Regrettably, she's one of far too many politicians of this moment who think and speak with no regard for truth or reasonable argument. The real concern here shouldn't be her personality or her flawed thinking, but what she shows us about the broader political landscape. We are, after all, in an era when her party's dominant leader and presidential candidate and other Republican politicians are feeding voters a steady diet of untruths and twisted logic while repeatedly attacking the credibility of truth-tellers, as when Donald Trump labeled the news media "the enemy of the American people."
Years of such false messaging, coinciding with the emergence of powerful new technologies for creating and spreading disinformation, have put us where we are now: seven months from an election that could be the most crucial test between truth and lies, and of basic democratic principles and practice, since the post-Civil War era a century and a half ago.
To add it all up: 43 names, 22 of them belonging to children 11 years old or younger, all killed in three school shootings carried out with assault-style semi-automatic weapons. I have no way of knowing if Marjorie Taylor Greene has ever looked at any of those names or spoken them aloud. Nor do I know -- though I'd make a pretty big bet against it! -- whether she's ever thought about what those 43 people might say to her if they hadn't been silenced by death. But I do know this: by any tenable standard of moral decency, intellectual honesty, or logic, the name Marjorie Taylor Greene is covered with shame.
Copyright 2024 Arnold R. Isaacs
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