Be polite? Remain silent? Who benefits? Who pays?

Michael Moore does a dreadful thing in this piece, he reveals a photo of 14 year old Emmett Till beaten to death in 1955. He tells of the police of Selma, Alabama, brutally beating, hosing and tear-gassing a group of African Americans for simply trying to cross a bridge during a protest march in March of 1965. He shows photos of some of the 500 civilians U.S. soldiers massacred at My Lai in Vietnam in March, 1968. He describes what happened to the flesh and bone of little children massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Don't talk about these murders! Don't show photos! It isn't polite and it hurts the families to see their slaughtered loved ones or see what USA soldiers did to children in Viet nam. Don't discuss moral or ethical issues. We might embarrass our citizens if they knew what one of our own is capable of doing. Blindness! Deafness! Silence! If we do not see or hear or speak, those awful things didn't happen!

NO! NO! NO! Look at the truth, hear the cries of those hurting, speak out against violence, lies, delusions and denial. Healing cannot begin until we do.

America, You Must Not Look Away (How to Finish Off the NRA)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-moore/newtown-gun-control_b_2...

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Steph S. on March 14, 2013 at 11:38pm

Thank you Joan. We should not remain silent.

Permalink Reply by Chris Breman on March 15, 2013 at 1:38am

Thanks Joan! The time that silence was golden is long past...

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on March 15, 2013 at 2:17am

With too little empathy I'm sociopathic.

With too much empathy I'm ?????

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on March 16, 2013 at 4:06am

I needed some time to think on it.

With too much empathy I'm wanting the world to do something else for a while.

And dammit, it usually doesn't.

Permalink Reply by Joan Denoo on March 16, 2013 at 12:18pm

Let me understand if I read you correctly. You want the world to do something else than think for a while. Is that what you mean?

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on March 16, 2013 at 5:56pm

Joan, I want the world to do something that differs from what it has been doing.

Permalink Reply by Loren Miller on March 15, 2013 at 5:43am

Fact is, you can be QUITE polite ... though NOT silent ... by following Mr. Moore's example here.  And he is absolutely right: we've been decoupled from the horror of the immediate aftermath of these shootings.  Though there has been outcry and a lot of it, it has been in response to the event itself and not The Direct Evidence of the event.  That is thought to be too gruesome, too horrifying for public view.

To that, I say that it is time for the public news media to grow a thicker skin, to be willing to face what the NRA doesn't want us to see - The Truth, even as Moore states - and ACT ON IT.

Permalink Reply by John Lynch on March 15, 2013 at 1:47pm

I agree Loren but society has to much fear of those in power to expose it,

Permalink Reply by Joan Denoo on March 16, 2013 at 12:21pm

Fear is what holds battered women and children, and even men, from thinking and acting in ways that solve problems. Fear is what enables one person to submit instead of stand up. Fear is what sends one nation to war against another. Fear is what binds our minds and actions to do the known and familiar and suffer the consequences. 

We are grown up and can learn how to think and act through fear. 

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on March 16, 2013 at 5:58pm

Some of us are grown up. Some of us are not.

Permalink Reply by John Lynch on March 15, 2013 at 8:59am

Evil exist when good men do nothing

Permalink Reply by Tom Sarbeck on March 15, 2013 at 5:40pm

And good triumphs when evil folk do nothing.

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