Knee Jerk Reactions

It is interesting how a test for your reflexes has come to describe the human condition where you must take action, any action, when something happens.  Wouldn’t this reaction be better described as a fight or flight reflex?  

This past weekend a madman opened fire on a group of innocent people assembled to bring our government closer to the people.  By all measures this killer acted without reason and with malice.  The aftermath of this senseless and brutal act can only be described as a National Knee Jerk.

People with more technology than common sense, and Media types with personal agendas immediately rushed to judgement, implying motivation and blame where none existed, or at least the motivation they claimed didn’t.  The Sheriff, an elected official, immediately pulled out the democratic talking points and used them to fan the flames of ideologue controversy.  The media, in what appeared to be a focused effort to out do each other in the compassion category ran story after story over vitriolic speech and the consequences of it.

I have long believed the personal attacks and demeaning approach to talking about the opposition’s point of view we see as politician after politician fights for sound bite time is contra-productive. But it is nowhere near so bad that rational people lose contact with reality and rush out to murder the first politician they find.  What is disturbing is that so many young people think it perfectly acceptable to transmit hateful speech and to mimic the name calling they see all around them.  We routinely see on the internet where people unwilling to use there own names will call others vile and filthy things.  Typical bullying by cowards.

Now, as just a bit of sanity seems to be settling into the discussion we have the next round of knee jerk reactions.  We must legislate the possibility of this ever happening again!   Some want to enact security bubbles around the Judges and Congress to prevent some assassin from shooting them.  Don’t we already have laws making this a crime?  How affective were those laws?  If we create a law that someone with a gun can’t get closer than 1,000 ft to a representative will we have to double, triple or quadruple the number of police to search everyone at 999 feet?  What happens if we have a sniper at 1,500 ft do we add a law for that?  Won’t that do more to separate us from our government than it will to stop political assassinations?  Maybe we should require each senator have an android or an avatar to represent them in public.  That would seem a whole lot more affective, but at the end of the day it creates and us and them separation.  Don’t we really want them to be us?

The final knee jerk is the addition of “vitriolic speech” to the politically correct lexicon.  From now on anytime someone doesn’t like what you have to say they will pull this out, claiming you are poisoning the dialogue and will be responsible for all the bad things the next nut-job does.  Media pundits and commentators are problematic, this should make the discussion of first amendment rights a lively debate over the coming decade.