When things get like this
When things get like this. I don’t want to even come near my blog.
What things, you ask?
Well, big things, like taking assault weapons out of the Democrat’s gun safety bill. This makes me despair for our country. Everyone is being held hostage to a single lobbying group’s crazed paranoia. The leadership of the NRA is certifiably insane and should not be allowed to have guns, except that in this country, of course crazy people are allowed to have guns. That’s what happens when you don’t control access to guns. Crazy people get their hands on them.
(WASHINGTON) — An assault weapons ban won’t be in the gun-control legislation that Democrats bring to the Senate floor next month, a decision that means the ban’s chances of survival now are all but hopeless.
And the media’s reaction to the Steubenville rape case. This one makes me despair and weep.
From Slate:
“The Steubenville Rapists are not tragic heroes.”
No, they are not, but you couldn’t tell that by the media reaction. I have yet to hear a mea culpa from the newscasters either, who should all be ashamed of themselves. Not just the broadcasting companies. The newscasters themselves.
I can’t even write any more about these two topics because I’ll either cry or scream obscenities, or both, and I’ve being doing enough of that already (see below).
On a personal level, we’re knee deep in college applications for my youngest son. And when I say everything that could go wrong did, it is not an exaggeration. Okay, a little bit of an exaggeration. Like, the house didn’t catch on fire. And nobody died. But other than that, yeah. It has been a constant cluster of amazing proportions. And if you have teens coming up on this, let me give you a hint: Even though you are probably a normal parent who does not hover over your child’s every move, even though you laugh at the whole concept of helicopter parenting, now is the time to micromanage the hell out of everything, double and triple check the work, and start making phone calls in 12 hours (okay, eight hours) if you haven’t heard back from the school.
Because if I had done that I would have pissed off every admissions office at the schools where my son applied but we sure as shit wouldn’t be in this situation right now.
I have so much stuff to do that I can’t even enjoy the fact that I finished the first draft of Bandit Girls. That’s right. Done. But did I celebrate? I sent out a single tweet and that’s it. Usually writing The End is one of the most fulfilling parts of writing a novel. But no. Right now, writing is taking a back seat to real life.
I know that my son will get into college, and I know it will all work out.
I don’t know if my country is entering into a spiral of dysfunction so deep that we are living in the decline of the American era. Everything we have always prided ourselves on has been overturned. We torture. We send unmanned drones to assassinate enemies in other countries, and we just might start doing that within our borders. We have a shrinking middle class and a growing oligarchy to rival that of Putin’s Russia.
So. Yeah. Maybe now you get why the blog has been silent for a while.
After all that doom and despair, I just need to look at something pretty.
The post When things get like this appeared first on Author Patrice Sarath.
