Our neighbour and Morwenna's friend Eden is off to Hawaii today for Christmas and we are looking after her enormous rabbit Pepito, and inheriting their Christmas tree. President Obama is also in Hawaii, and I hope he is having a good Christmas. I am imagining him with his head sunk in his hands, as he tries to work out how to make progress when he has to deal with the Republican party and the NRA (National Rifle Association). The Republicans have flatly refused to raise taxes on millionaires, and the NRA's response to the Connecticut shootings was to advocate armed guards in every elementary school.
No doubt this was reported in the UK. But when your own children go to one of the elementary schools to which the NRA must be referring, it brings it home more. How can these views be mainstream (the NRA has 4 million members) and yet so removed from rational thinking?
After Dunblane in 1996, hand guns were banned in the UK. Even a small step towards that here - e.g. changing licensing laws for automatic weapons, would be a victory for Obama.
People will often ask me what living in America is like ... I'm not always truthful. The cost of living is great and we are able to (more than) survive very comfortably doing jobs that wouldn't afford us the same privileges or leisure time elsewhere. But I do have to put on the proverbial blinkers more often than I would prefer. The gun lobby is one of these topics that I cannot comprehend. There are some here who think like me, but the majority believe that it is safer, and a civic duty, to have the right to gun ownership. But when children go to school with the constant reminder of the presence of guns, I find that incomprehensible.
ReplyDeleteOther issues I am flummoxed by are usually professed by people of faith and in my mind personify selfishness and lacking in community spirit. America is a country of proud individuals. We are culturally different, and I'm not saying that I wouldn't have the same arguments with people in Britain, but I feel that I am very much in the minority and isolated in my views. Maybe if people were able to argue a point convincingly, rather than just belligerently claim to be following God's teaching or regurgitate what they've been fed from Fox News etc I would be able to respect their philosophies ... but alas, I find it simpler to look the other way ... Thankfully I don't disagree with everyone and there are more than enough people here with whom I can interact without getting 'political'.
Thanks so much for your interesting comments Kate, fellow Brit and vicar's daughter.... I did take heart from Obama's inaugural speech yesterday. He looks as if he is up for a fight on important issues.
ReplyDeleteGreat to have you just over the mountains. Lx