EDGEWATER -- The sights, sounds and personal accounts of the Boston Marathon bombing make me sick to my stomach with grief for all involved and for this country. Then I heard that the race was dedicated to the Newtown, Conn. survivors and many were in the stands observing the race and I cried.
How much more can those poor people take? We in this country have spent so many years believing that these types of things can’t happen here but of late they are more and more. Nowadays, I would think twice or maybe three times before doing anything involving a large crowd of people.
When I was a kid, the worst of these type events was when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and I wasn’t even born yet so although it was part of my country’s history it was not close to me. The world fought the war to end all wars and we lamented the terrible situations of other countries that lived in a constant state of war but it wouldn’t ever be like that here. How wrong we were.
No place in this world is safe any more.
We must stop being our complacent selves and also stop being the knee-jerk reactors we have been. While I agree we cannot live in fear we must be better prepared for our individual selves and out nations as a whole. We tend to wait until something happens then shut the barn door after the horse is out. Shoe bomber on an airplane? Everyone now takes off their shoes. Terrorists with liquid bombs attempting to board planes, so now we can’t take regular size bottles of our necessities aboard any more.
After Newtown and other school shootings they beefed up police presence at the schools. Shouldn’t we have had that already?
While we can’t possibly anticipate every dastardly deed terrorist and mentally ill people will think up, we can take preventive measures before things happen and not react after the fact. We also need to make the correct reactions when necessary.
After Newtown, everyone is centered on gun control. Think about the shootings in the recent past. What was the main instigator of all of them? No, not guns or the fact that these people had access to them. The instigator is untreated mental illness. That is where we need to make laws and spend money, not on taking guns away from responsible people.
One of the first items excluded in budget cuts is mental health care.
Treatment facilities for substance abuse which is also an instigator of violence are very hard to find or afford therefore those people go untreated. The worst times get especially in a lousy economy, the more depressed and volatile people get. Shouldn’t we be working to fix that problem? The politicians aren’t facing the right problems in my opinion.
If they hadn’t shut down the mental institutions and put all those people on our streets as homeless people things would be much different. If there were people to listen when a parent tries to get help for a kid and places for them to be treated that you don’t have to be a movie star to afford, they won’t be free to shoot or blow up themselves or anyone else.
It's time to start funding the right things and stop harassing the gun people don’t you think?