Monday, November 6, 2017

In Need Of "Lego" Galileo -- On This Sad Dawn... We Sorely Need Some Good Ju Ju...


Eight members of one family -- including a mom who was five months pregnant -- gone. At least 26 snuffed out, and 20 more injured overall -- all this, while attending Sunday church services. The headlines are almost too much to bear.

And a President who tweets that laws related to easy access to assault weapons. . . aren't the issue, in his view.

He is right that the man was mentally ill. But so was the shooter in Las Vegas; and in Plano; and in Antioch; and in Orlando; and in Dallas; San Bernardino; Charleston; Chatanooga; Colorado Springs; Sandy Hook; Columbine, and on and on and on. . . . Giving mentally-ill people easy access to bump stock enabled, fully automatic assault rifles (for which the ONLY purpose is killing large numbers of human beings quickly). . . is lunacy. What is disgusting about these events is not their horrific details, but rather. . . their increasingly-mundane regularity. Their predictability. They are becoming a new "normal" -- every few months, ever since a pro-gun-lobby administration was handed the reins of power in America. And that is. . . sickening.

But regular readers know that is my view, already.

And so, I'll let the grimly-updated numbers on the masthead speak to the carnage -- just on Mr. Trump's watch -- from such weapons. And I will choose to look away, for a moment -- to a brighter side -- of our planet's ongoing scientific efforts.

As luminous dawn starts to arrive, post daylight savings time, I'll spend the rest of these electrons mentioning that right on schedule, just as Jupiter and Earth fell out of a Galileo predicted obscuring alignment with the Sun, relative to one another, sweet copper-legged twisty lil' Juno began to beam back her data. She reached out and phoned in -- to let all the hard-working people who care about her know that her birthday glide had passed well, and their faith in her sweetly sublime Galilean orbital science. . . was not in vain. [These same little Lego figures (at right) are all actually onboard, inside the shepherded satellite/moonlet we call Juno -- sprinting through the darkness, as I type this. And that makes me smile -- as does all that transpired in my extended family this past weekend. . . .]

You see -- Juno, she reaffirms (for me) that working together, and thinking nobly, we humans can do some pretty amazing things. Working together, and respecting each others' differences, we can be (as Kid President so aptly says) "pretty awesome".

I would hope that GOP leaders in Congress (with or without 45) would decide that it would be "pretty awesome" to stop making it so easy for mentally-ill criminals to get fully automatic weapons. There are no easy answers -- and no one measure will solve this long-vexing problem in America, but it is hard to see a crying need for people to own these kinds of weapons -- ones useful only in ground combat, in a theater of war, on a battlefield -- between humans.

We should be "gooder" than that. Thanks, Kid President.

नमस्ते

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