This past weekend, when we all should have been able to celebrate a three-day weekend to mark the proverbial end of the summer, we were instead hit with both a heartbreaking mass shooting in Texas and a hurricane set to hit the Southeast. The shooting, which occurred in Odessa, Texas, took the lives of at least seven people and injured over 20. Meanwhile, Hurricane Dorian already has accumulated at least five deaths in the Bahamas and has caused mandatory evacuations from numerous counties in Florida — with possibly many more to come.
However, during a time where all of us, as Americans, should unite and rebuild, we instead immediately jump at the opportunity to attack one another. One would think that fighting pure human evil or protecting and helping our neighbors find refuge and rebuild from a devastating storm would be uniting forces. They certainly should be.
But sadly, they aren’t. And worse, this fact ought not to be surprising. The media and the Left immediately milk these events for all they are worth in order to push for the policies their collective side has always wanted. In the case of mass shootings, it’s severe gun control measures, as some of the top 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have already pushed in lieu of respectfully mourning with their fellow countrymen. In the case of hurricanes, while they should be standing with everyone in the way of the storm, they inevitably turn the conversation to climate change in order to push other left-wing policies — as if humans have the ability to somehow change the fact that hurricanes have been in existence for just about as long as the world itself has existed.
These tactics may be convenient, but they are truly disgusting. And the opportunistic grifters, both in the media and in politics, make us lose our compassion because we all end up at each other’s throats when we should all be embracing each other in mourning and rebuilding.
How much longer, as a society, can we last if all we see in everything is politics and ways to destroy our fellow citizens?
For example, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX), polling at 2% in the current Democratic presidential primary and desperate for attention, is now fundraising off his use of the phrase “this is f***ed up” on CNN by selling t-shirts with that as a slogan.
Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) immediately took the opportunity to mock the idea of good people with firearms stopping bad ones:
Regarding Hurricane Dorian, the Left immediately jumps to the idea of climate change, almost as if it is rooting for an outcome that can advance its agenda — rather than rooting for the safety of the people in the eye of the storm. And of course, the Left takes an opportunity to lambast President Trump, because why not?
These are but a few examples, but it shows how our broader society is in danger. As John Adams once famously stated: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” And we’re losing our morality quickly by using these tragedies as nothing more than opportunities to club our opponents over the head.
That’s not to say we should never debate, of course. Free speech and civil discourse are staples of our nation and always have been. But demonization and knee-jerk reaction in order to politicize and personally gain from these events is a surefire way to expedite the crumbling of the civil society right before our eyes. And it won’t be the fault of guns or climate change. We’ll have no one else to blame but ourselves.