House Majority Whip shot at congressional baseball field

[Belsnickel]

(06-15-2017, 10:38 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: What does need to come of this terrible event is an acknowledgement, from both sides, that things have gone too far. I've said before that it's generally the party out of power that engages in the fiercest rhetoric. I think Trump took this to eleven. Trump certainly took things too far on the campaign trail, e.g. offering to pay the legal bills of anyone who beat up a protester. The response from the left was to go to fifteen. I've mentioned before that anyone not heavily criticizing Trump's every move is immediately branded a Trump supporter by many (most?) left leaning people. There's a refusal to even see the possibility of a middle ground and it's pushing people to the extremes. Extreme thinking is eventually, for some, going to lead to extreme action. We see it with Antifa, we saw it at Trump rallies in CA and we just saw the worst example of it yesterday.

It's got to stop and it needs to stop at the top. Maxine Waters, Gillibrand, etc. need to tone down the extreme rhetoric and hopefully that will trickle down to celebrities, which will trickle down and so forth. If things stay as is I predict a dark outcome.

The problem is that there has been an increased polarization in our government (which is funny to me, given how we don't have many real liberals in the bunch thanks to neo-liberalism) and that polarization is just a reflection of society as a whole. This isn't new, but is has been compounding for a couple of decades now. I've said before, the division in Congress has not been this wide since the antebellum Congress.

I don't know what it is going to take, but when we come out the other side it could be something different than we have known before. The 14th Amendment drastically changed how our government institutions and it was a result of the divisiveness that existed pre-war.