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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 6/11/09

Wingnut Murder Spree or Are WE Part of the Problem?

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Rob Kall
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Anti abortion people put on a shocked face and decry the murder of Dr. Tiller.

The Washington Post reports that John de Nugent, white supremacist friend of the Holocaust Museum murderer James W. Von Brunn "called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of "a loner and a hothead." "The responsible white separatist community condemns this," he said. "It makes us look bad."

Crooksandliars reports that Glen Beck suggests that the Holocaust Museum killer is not a right winger, he's a lefty.
Beck offered the following rationale on his Fox News show tonight:
Beck: What they're missing is: The pot in America is boiling. And this is just yet another warning to all Americans of things to come.


Actually, Beck has this exactly right. But frankly, it's boiling because of people like Glenn Beck, ranting hysterically every night about impending apocalypses of various forms -- looming "liberal fascism," the "economic meltdown," the "New World Order," violence spilling over the Mexican border, even FEMA concentration camps.


Well thank you for your deflection of responsibility sir. But you can't stir up and promote the hate and then beg off when the hate evokes action.

When behaviors manifest in the public sphere, when extremist "activators" in the media and on the web gives huge amounts of attention to people who go crazy, who act out the worst kinds of behavior, we are likely to see more of the same-- an increased frequency of this kind of behavior. Rupert Sheldrake calls this morphogenetic field theory.

Today's TV news coverage serves James W. Von Brunn well, giving the link to his website, broadcasting in high rotation repetition his message of hate. I can imagine his extremist hate group allies whispering to him at his hospital bedside, "You done good Jim. You're a hero. You've done more for the cause, getting all this publicity than a thousand websites or protests. You've moved the cause a quantum leap forward."

And they'd be right, thanks to media coverage of his sick act of cowardice. And maybe even this article I'm writing will help to forward that cause, because I too, am helping to cast light on him.

A government source told me, "continued media coverage only perpetuates the problem." 

What a dilemma, tell a compelling, dramatic story, and by doing so get sucked down the rabbit-hole, helping the haters.  What do we do, shut up?

As a columnist who must plead guilty to years of vilifying the other side, perhaps I must face the reality that we all need to cool the rhetoric and talk about issues, not toxic characterizations. We need to be able to deal with the tough problems we all face. A climate in which the idea of talking about the problem raises the risk of exacerbating that problem is dangerous.

 

There's no simple answer, but surely, fomenting the wingnuts and adding to their ranks is not part of the solution.

In the late '90's, Tipper Gore campaigned to get Musicians to clean up their lyrics act. Perhaps it's time for another campaign.

I started this article with a shorter title-- Wingnut Murder Spree. But that involves name calling that goes to the place I'm calling for us all to refrain from. So I edited it. It's a small start.

We are NOT all Anne Coulters and perhaps, whether left or right, we need to work very hard to move far, far away from that way of dealing with our dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs.

It's easy for passions to run high. We need to direct those energies into productive activism that makes change happen, not the anger and hate and toxic talk that potentiates more murders and violence.

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

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Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness (more...)
 

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