At 09:15 PM 11/20/2002 -0500, you wrote: >Now it seems someone is advocating the murder of U.S. Senators. I'm >sitting here wondering just what to say. I'm shocked to grossly understate. I was shocked by that, as well. If it was a joke, it was in singularly bad taste. I watched Sen. Daschle getting interviewed on C-Span today, and he said that whenever certain issues come up, and the radio talk-show right-wing people get rolling with it, the number of direct physical threats he and his family receive skyrocket. He says that the problem is that people are using politics as entertainment, and when the commentators get so emotional about it, people feel the need to actually do something violent about it. If people get enough reinforcement for this right-wing outrage, they start believing that it is normal (or even "American") to feel this violent about politics, and to physically threaten people because of it. I'm reminded once again that our technology has made drastic changes in our lives within living memory, while the capacity to adjust to it may take a few hundred years, or even longer. What happens to people who evolved (uh-oh, there's another hot word) for millennia to live in small groups almost without artificial light, eating mainly unprocessed food which was in short supply for much of the year, and walking around a lot in the normal course of finding it ... [stop for breath] when they now have bright 18 hour daylengths year around, drive everywhere, watch TV and listen to the radio constantly, are exposed to crowds of strangers all the time, and eat processed, dense food full of substances which didn't even exist a few years ago? Oh, and write and read political flames on a technical list? Perhaps the answer is that they get fat, irritated, and angry, and fly off the handle a lot? And the kids get Type II diabetes 35 years ahead of time. (Conrad, where's that suit you were going to send me?) susan
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