It's not OK to joke about killing anyone - especially our leaders
There is a small brick house on Milledge Avenue near Five Points in Athens next to an old girlfriend's one-time house not far from Memorial Park at an intersection with a stop light. It is for sale and it has a Halloween display in front, neither of which by themselves makes this a remarkable story. It is that they have decided to place a fake headstone with a Barack Obama '08 sign on it that makes this so reprehensible. Why not go ahead and burn a cross and hang a noose from a tree? It is ugly, uncalled for and an embarrassment to all of Athens and surrounding areas.
Political speech is protected speech, so therefore people can scream "Terrorist," "Treason" and "Kill him" at rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin when attacking the character. It does not allow us to perpetuate a hateful mindset where joking about death, especially the death of one of the people who will be President of this country. You can express your political sentiments without approving asinine sentiments in this country with a considerable history of political assassination, lynchings and racial violence even in this generation. Every day some new story or tale or You Tube clip or something comes along showing how slow our evolution has been as a species and thank God John McCain took it upon himself to remove the microphone from that lady in Minneapolis last week. I think that will go down as the one galvanizing moment of the campaign, perhaps McCain's "Enough" watershed.
We will elect a new President of these United States of America inside of a month. Can a country keep the rhetorhic reduced to the issues and not attack each other's character for a couple of weeks? Can we keep from taking potshots at each other, both literal and figurative? Let us embark on a path of mutual consideration and compassion, and not foster such an atmophere of mistrust, intolerance and scorn. I am all for freedom of speech, and I concur that political speech has its proper place on Sunday morning news shows and blogs, but please let's take a few steps back from the enabling of the racist bullshit ledge we have found ourselves on lately.
Political speech is protected speech, so therefore people can scream "Terrorist," "Treason" and "Kill him" at rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin when attacking the character. It does not allow us to perpetuate a hateful mindset where joking about death, especially the death of one of the people who will be President of this country. You can express your political sentiments without approving asinine sentiments in this country with a considerable history of political assassination, lynchings and racial violence even in this generation. Every day some new story or tale or You Tube clip or something comes along showing how slow our evolution has been as a species and thank God John McCain took it upon himself to remove the microphone from that lady in Minneapolis last week. I think that will go down as the one galvanizing moment of the campaign, perhaps McCain's "Enough" watershed.
We will elect a new President of these United States of America inside of a month. Can a country keep the rhetorhic reduced to the issues and not attack each other's character for a couple of weeks? Can we keep from taking potshots at each other, both literal and figurative? Let us embark on a path of mutual consideration and compassion, and not foster such an atmophere of mistrust, intolerance and scorn. I am all for freedom of speech, and I concur that political speech has its proper place on Sunday morning news shows and blogs, but please let's take a few steps back from the enabling of the racist bullshit ledge we have found ourselves on lately.
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