Incoming Rant - Orlando Shooting and Politics

The following will be based solely on my opinion and facts as I see them. You can agree or disagree as you see fit, in fact I encourage that.

The recent shooting at a gay club in Orlando is tragic. Words cannot convey how bad it was, how families had their lives forever altered because of one person’s hate. The he was able to purchase guns AND be on the FBI’s radar makes no sense whatsoever. The fact is, all the facts about this guys, as the media covers him, are exactly what is clouding up the issue and making it horribly hard to get any real answers. Those answers could be a catalyst for change.

First of all, stop acting outraged when politicians tweet about how horrible they feel, but accepted money from the NRA. Politicians LIE. ALL politicians lie ALWAYS. No exceptions. Most of them have a handler that manages their twitter accounts and makes posts as if it were that actual politician. More than half of them don’t know what Twitter is, and can’t understand technology enough to use Social Media correctly. Exposing them for accepting money from the NRA and then posting condolences online is such a colossal waste of time and effort. The person on Twitter is some college student being paid to make posts that make it seem like that politician is Just Like You And Me, tweeting about things just like we do.

Politicians will NEVER EVER EVER vote to reflect what people want because people don’t pay them to. Companies, corporations and special interests group DO. Politicians have more sponsors than NASCAR drivers, and if they had to wear stickers than showed which sponsors purchased their votes, they would need bigger suits. Conservative, liberal, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter, it never did. Every one of them is bought and paid for, and you’ll never see change until some corporation wants it enough to pay for it. The NRA and the Gun Lobby own more politicians than almost any other Special Interests group outside of Pharmaceutical companies. you will not see any effective Gun Control legislation until something stops those Special Interest groups from buying political favors. And that won’t happen as long as members of Congress receive 6 figure salaries and have no accountability.

The media wants this to be a terrorist attack to fit a narrative made by Hillary Clinton to push for more military invasions and presence in foreign countries. If this person was in fact a terrorist, then it allows her to attach this to her already flawed campaign to push for a much more aggressive stance against countries which coincidentally tend to be oil producing.

The Christian right wing wants this to be because he was a Muslim. Nothing feeds their hatred of cultures they don’t understand better than finding out someone that killing people on American soil better than pointing out that person was a different religion. It also deflects attention from the pastor that rages against the Sin of Homosexuality when he is caught with a male prostitute and all of the hypocrisy that is rampant in the modern day Church and churches. How would these so-called Christians react to find out the Muhammad and Jesus were direct-lineage cousins? That Christ is mentioned MULTIPLE times in the Quran? That Christianity and Islam are tied culturally and racially from the Middle East? That Jesus wasn’t (gasp) white?

The LGBT want this to be significant against every member of the LGBT community. With all of the recent attention to North Carolina’s HB-2 Bathroom bill, and the growing Congressional attention on States Rights vs Federal Intervention regarding transgender rights, this attack against gays by a radical terrorist would be one more rallying cry to keep the spotlight on those issues. The LGBT community sees this for what it is at it’s center; A hate crime. There is no confusion about the gunman’s religion, or his nationality, or his radicalization. This was a man who hated gay people and went to a place where he could shoot as many as possible to do as much damage as he could. Everything else is secondary and somewhat tangential.

The media will spin this, and the politicians will use this. Tragedy strikes everyday in this country and in the World at large. These 49 deaths will be forgotten just as the deaths of the 2,997 people in the September 11th attack have been forgotten. Just like that terrorist attack on American soil, this will be used for as long as it remains useful to some political agenda and gains ratings bumps for some media outlet.  It will be the Big Story until the next Big Story happens, and it will fade into the collective consciousness as they always do.