I am sure that anyone who stumbles along here will be able to relate to being and feeling stressed. I have felt stressed dealing with this blog post today. Little and not so small computer errors and glitches have made life difficult as I have been engaged in this process.
But there are other reasons to be stressed that come from beyond our own lives. Many Americans of very different persuasions are disturbed by undercover video of doctors with Planned Parenthood discussing slaughtering late term fetuses babies and selling their part on demand. Disagreement over what it all means still goes on and the United States Senate failed to pass a bill to defund Planned Parenthood but clearly a lot of people are aware of these videos and concerned about what they mean about the state of our society. The reader here can get a view of these thoughts about the videos from a couple of links provided in this article.Planned Parenthood videos as discussed in the Daily Beast are here. Planned Parenthood Videos as discussed in the realm of the Christian Broadcasting Network are here.
We all know that family love and motherhood itself as a symbol and fact of welcoming and nurturing matter a great deal to the species and to society. All of the child sacrificing cults, infanticide regimes and abortion programs of human history have not changed the fact that people still know these are sacred and important matters that deserve care and consideration. We are right to worry about what parenthood and its plannning look like in the world and in our country.
Americans especially want things to not be too terrible we ant to believe that even that worst events are isolated and unrelated to other problems that we might have. In my writing on the recent theater shooting in Lafayette I took a view that this was not an act of random psychotic rage. You can see that post here. But it is hard to say what to make of all of this connected ness between tragedies.
There was a family in which two sisters were caught up in the shooting at the Grand Theater. One was an EMT responding to the incident when she saw her uninjured sister responding to other people covered in blood herself. The sister was a swim instructor who was trained in first aid and CPR and was helping out. You can see their story here. This family has become one of the local symbols for hope and courage in this area. Now the people who were at the heart of this part of the story have lost a third sibling, their brother took his own life yesterday after posting a cryptic assumed suicide not on Facebook. He also seemed angry at people who were attacking him in some way. I am leaving out the words and his name to protect some privacy but I have read the note.
The sign that is a feature of the city announcing showtimes is dark
Did a family that was a symbol of hope in stressful times come under attack from some amorphous source of stress in which real people who are our enemies might have a part? Did someone see a weakness in the brother and exploit it to bring down this symbol of resistance to the madness in the world?
It could happen without the brother knowing it. Nobody has the resources to investigate such subtleties. In America it is more or less a religion to mock much more obvious connections.
Stress propagates across society in complex ways. Is it possible to pretend that such stress is not always random. Many people seek to create stress and direct it and we all know that to be true. Conspiracies abound in the real world and not just in derided theories. The world is a dangerous and stressful place. My belief is that we can build a better future if we accept that nightmares do lurk around us than if we make it a false matter of faith that they do not.
Snakes and other issues complicate my life
Not everything that threatens us is evil and not everything that is evil directly threatens us. But we cannot afford to live in a world of our imagining. It would be nice if horrible things did not happen — but they do. We all have to decide how to deal with that reality day in and day out.
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