Once again, I'm surfing the news at ridiculously late hours of the night (and who says I have no life?). Perchance, I came across this blog post from the USNews website, calling for, of all things, calmed tempers. He isn't making any terribly controversial claims, nor finding much fault in the principles that lead to the Teabagging parties or Governor Perry trying to restart the Civil War. Instead, he is making the simple human appeal that hystrionics might be cathartic, that they might be soothing, and they might feel like a chance to air serious greivances, yet there are those out there, with the capability to enact tragedy who are inspiried, encouraged, and sustained by such hyper-passionate rhetoric.
For the first time in a while, I read the post and I could see the author behind it. I saw a real human being, maybe with a drink in his hand, sitting in a dimmed study late at night, gently thumbing a piece of rubble. Sitting there and thinking, wandering back to a blackened, charred street in Oklamhoma City, and seeing in his mind's eye the daycare across the street. Thinking about the all-too-human tragedies produced by people with too little common sense to seperate the rhetorical flourishes from legitimate calls to action, and sufficiently empowered to realize that divide.
Then again, maybe that scene exists only in my mind's eye, who knows. Anyways, to hear a call for soothed tempers, to hear reminders of those who cannot seperate the symbolic from the real, to hear someone make an appeal to our better natures helps to reaffirm my faith that there are still reasonable people out there in politics, at least for the rest of the day.
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