A New Post Over at Recap Attack, by Yours Truly

A new podcast is posted at RecapAttack, and I'm guesting again, so go on and check that out here.

To go along with it, I've cooked up one of my usual blog-essays especially for Recap Attack. Here's the teaser:

I skew to the left on most political issues, from your garden variety hot-button issues on down. I believe in a woman's right to choose if her body will carry a pregnancy to term; I believe that guns should be legal but tightly regulated; and I believe that taxes are the bread and butter that keeps my roads paved, food fecal-matter free, and my house from burning down or getting burglarized -- generally, I wholeheartedly support paying them.

Not everyone feels the way I do, and I can accept that. Hell, I can even embrace it -- this is a complex world, and it takes more than one viewpoint to create a rich and varied culture like that of our U.S. of A. What I cannot accept is the level to which our intolerance of opposing viewpoints has risen in recent years. More specifically, I cannot believe that in the pantomime of our soundbite-ready political system, we actually permitted ourselves to come to the very brink of default. Funny money or not, there were real people with real paychecks and our credibility as a nation at risk, and our elected officials could not manage to step down from the grandstand long enough to do what had to be done -- at least not soon enough to save us international embarrassment and a whole lot of freaking out -- and raise the debt limit so our city on a hill could pay the electric company and keep the beacons lit.

Read the rest on Recap Attack's page, here. And check back on this blog on Monday - there will be a piping hot post, fresh out of the oven just for you.

Behind the Pantomime, A Genuine Possibility for Change

I skew to the left on most political issues, from your garden variety hot-button issues on down. I believe in a woman's right to choose if her body will carry a pregnancy to term; I believe that guns should be legal but tightly regulated; and I believe that taxes are the bread and butter that keeps my roads paved, food fecal-matter free, and my house from burning down or getting burglarized -- generally, I wholeheartedly support paying them.

Not everyone feels the way I do, and I can accept that. Hell, I can even embrace it -- this is a complex world, and it takes more than one viewpoint to create a rich and varied culture like that of our U.S. of A. What I cannot accept is the level to which our intolerance of opposing viewpoints has risen in recent years. More specifically, I cannot believe that in the pantomime of our soundbite-ready political system, we actually permitted ourselves to come to the very brink of default. Funny money or not, there were real people with real paychecks and our credibility as a nation at risk, and our elected officials could not manage to step down from the grandstand long enough to do what had to be done -- at least not soon enough to save us international embarrassment and a whole lot of freaking out -- and raise the debt limit so our city on a hill could pay the electric company and keep the beacons lit.

Tucson's Own

I waited a while before making this post. I wanted to let myself process things, let the emotions play out a bit, get some distance from what happened Saturday.

I'm referring to the shootings in Tucson on January 8th, 2011. We were driving back from a ski trip, and my husband turned to me as we walked back to the car at the rest stop.

"Did you hear Gabrielle Giffords is dead?"
"What?!"
"Yeah . . ." And then he made a sound like a laugh, at the shock of it all.

Thankfully, that turned out not to be true. Gabby Giffords survived being shot in the head and was taken to UMC. Her truly incredible recovery and the outpouring of support from all over the country and the world has been inspiring and a comfort to me over this past week or so. Whether or not she'll ever fully recover is unknown, but there is good cause for hope.

Not everyone there was as lucky as Gabby, while others were far luckier. Nineteen people were shot in all, and six of those people died:

U.S.District Court Judge John Roll

Christina Taylor Green

Gabe Zimmerman

Dorwan Stoddard

Phyllis Schneck

Dorothy Morris

Thirteen others survived: Susan Hileman, Mavanell Stoddard, Pamela Simon, Ronald Barber, James Tucker, Kenneth Veeder, George Morris, James Fuller, Randy Gardner, Mary Reed, Kenneth Dorushka, and Bill Badge. 

The twenty-two year old gunman was Jared Loughner:
 

A yearbook photo.

On the U of A campus.

Being booked for the shooting.

How does one begin to process this? How does one young man -- the same age as my sister, a friend of a woman I work with -- undergo such a horrific transformation? What does it mean for those who were there to be a survivor, to be a victim? What does it mean to see my city and my state receive national wall to wall press coverage - to recall the newspaper I saved when I was twelve, its pictures and headlines telling of a massacre at Columbine and see the parallels - what can one possibly pull from this? Why do I stay away from my favorite news websites - is it to avoid more news of the tragedy or to pretend that the world hasn't nearly forgotten it, moving on to another day, another tragedy somewhere else?

In my coming posts, I'm going to attempt to answer these questions, if only to add my voice to the already hashed and rehashed version of events we've heard echoed across these last eleven days - if only to try to make some sense out of the non-sense that was Saturday. Please, feel free to add your comments, questions, suggestions for where this discussion should go - this should be a community thing.