Focused Read in 3-4 minutes
"Soapbox / Our Children
Deserve Better Than This
The survivors of the
Parkland massacre are take action to stop mass shootings. Will we let
them down, again?
(By Andrew Cohen
February 17, 2018)
We are leaving our
children a planet doomed by climate change and a nation saddled
in debt and deficit with an economy that is widening the gulf between
rich and poor. We are leaving them a country where it is
becoming harder for citizens to vote and where our drinking
water is becoming less safe to drink. We are leaving them all of
this, and more, and the worst of it is that the only ones we are
leaving it to will be those lucky enough to survive the relentless
gun violence that takes the lives of over a thousand of our
children each year.
Five years after Sandy Hook, nearly 20 years
after Columbine...
we still sacrifice our children to the Gun God.
… But the aftermath of
the shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland
was different from all its tragic predecessors in one sense.
For
once, the sorrow and rage offered by adults immediately was
drowned out by the wrath and the reason of their children.
No longer
willing to be sacrificed for some hoary constitutional theory, one
surviving student after another, born in the shadow of
Columbine, from the moment of the attack and for days
afterward, relentlessly and courageously called out their
parents and their politicians and their president for failing to do
what every child has a right to expect from all of us every day:
protect them from danger.
(Emphasis is mine.)
... These kids, these
eloquent kids, stared straight into cameras, like professionals,
to deliver their blunt message:
Get your acts together, stop
posturing and pretending gun violence is a problem that cannot be
solved, and come up with new policies that could keep just one more
American family from having to bear the unbearable burden.
… The truth is,
something equivalent to the mass shooting we just experienced
happens every day in America.
Every day in this country of
guns and madness and talking heads arguing over the Second
Amendment about two dozen children, our kids, our neighbors’
kids, our grandkids, are killed or wounded by guns.
... Sometimes it’s a mass
shooting. Sometimes it’s an accident. Sometimes it’s the brutal
reality of the dangerous neighborhoods we refuse to fix. Every day a
Columbine. Every day a Parkland. Every day a Virginia Tech.
Thoughts
and prayers and candlelight vigils and long-form news coverage when
the body count gets high enough. Maybe a local news report or two
when it’s just a single child gunned down on a street. Maybe
nothing when a kid finds his parent’s gun and accidentally
shoots himself in the head.
The survivors of these senseless acts
have a right to be as angry as the teenagers who survived Parkland
this week.
Our children deserve so
much more than we have been able or willing to give them.
And more
and more now, recognizing our futility, our shameless ineptitude,
they are giving us warning that they intend to fix what we cannot. I
hope they can. As quickly as they can.
And that when they do, they
have the grace to forgive the rest of us for failing them so often in
so many corners and classrooms of the country.”
You
can read more here
( Courtesy of Politico )
➥ Who I'm following on Twitter this week on the topic of #NeverAgain:
Vote Vets . Org , i.e. ( VoteVets #VetsVsTheNRA )
March For Our Lives
You can actually take some action and check out Everytown's page here
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"Opinion / Don’t blame
‘Washington.’
Blame the GOP.
(By Catherine Rampell)
Dysfunctional Washington refuses to work out its differences to solve
problems that matter to Americans.
So say pundits and policy
activists, perhaps hoping that diffuse criticism, rather than
finger-pointing, will yield a government willing to govern.
But the problem isn’t “Washington.” It isn’t “Congress,”
either. The problem is elected officials from a single political
party: the GOP.
Republicans in the White
House and Congress are the ones standing in the way of helping
“dreamers.”
They are not merely obstructing gun reform but also
rolling back existing gun-control measures.
You’d never know it from the usual “blame Washington” rhetoric,
but there are lots of common-sense policy changes, on supposedly
unsolvable issues, that large majorities of voters from both parties
support.
These include protecting
dreamers, the young undocumented immigrants brought here as children.
In a recent Quinnipiac poll, 81 percent of Americans, including
68 percent of Republicans, said dreamers should be allowed to stay
and eventually apply for citizenship. Other polls have
had similar results.
And yet, dreamers are
scheduled to start losing their protected...And who has blocked a
legislative fix? Republican lawmakers.
On guns, too, Congress has
been portrayed as generically dysfunctional, always at
reasonable-people-can-disagree loggerheads. But here, too, there is
widespread agreement among voters — from both parties — on modest
gun-control measures.
Nine in 10
Republicans support background checks for all gun
buyers. The same share supports preventing the mentally ill from
purchasing guns.
Majorities of Republican
voters also support banning gun modifications that can make
semiautomatic guns more like automatic ones; barring gun purchases by
people on terrorist no-fly lists; banning assault-style weapons; and
creating a federal database to track gun sales.
Again, that’s what Republican voters want. Those
preferences have been ill-served by NRA-funded
Republican politicians, however.
Republican
lawmakers killed universal background-check
bills considered after Sandy Hook and San Bernardino.
They voted against reinstating the assault weapons ban five
years ago, and not a single Republican is co-sponsoring the same
proposal now in the Senate.
Last year, Republicans voted to
roll back an Obama-era rule that would have made it harder for
people with mental illness to buy a gun.
Commentators have been
tiptoeing around some of these patterns, calling Congress
“deadlocked” and slamming Democrats for being “unwilling to
consider compromise.
… Americans of all
parties demand change. But politicians of all parties do not.
That may well be the right
calculus in these politically tribal times.
But for the rest of us,
obscuring which politicians stand in the way of that elusive
“compromise” may instead allow them to keep getting away with
it.”
You can read more here
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→ Direct sources for Democrats:
* ( Personal favored and most informative follows are shared here with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify I am using a star rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
The Democratic Party Website
Also
C-SPAN (a good place for speeches & hearings direct source (s))
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
→ Some of my favorite, most informative
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible media -- at the moment:
📰📰📰 Mother Jones
→ Some of the most credible Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
( 📎 Interesting to note: Wallace, a Republican (an inactive Republican I believe she calls herself) s new to the job but for right now she has clearly put country over party and her work on Trump GOP has been credible, IMO... )
...for Networking for Democrats today!
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
📎 Note: I rarely get involved in primary races -- outside of those in my own area. And, unless there is a glaring reason that can not be ignored, I support Democratic Party nominees winning in general elections.
.
.
.
(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: We are stronger together."
( #its2018now )
*
Curated by Gail Mountain, with occasional personal commentary, Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( You can also find me on Twitter at https://twitter.com/GKMTNtwits )
*
See the League of Women Voters website:
Vote411 here
Thank you for focusing!
g., aka Focused Democrat
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
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