Showing posts with label Orlando. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orlando. Show all posts

Monday, June 20, 2016

Getting the picture in the Age of Terror


It's summer in Omaha. And with the beginning of summer comes the College World Series, a fine way to spend a sultry evening in late June.

Added to the mix, starting next week, will be the U.S. Olympic Swim Trials at the CenturyLink Center Omaha, just across the street from TD Ameritrade Park downtown.

The CWS is Omaha's signature event, one that has become part of this Midwestern city's very being. It has come to symbolize what we all love most about amateur sports and about America's national pastime.

IT'S THE PICTURE Omaha wants to present to the country, and the one America wants to present to the world. Here, three of these pictures belong together.

Three of these pictures are kind of the same. Can you guess which one of these doesn't belong here?


Now, with apologies to Sesame Street, it's time to play our game.

Proceed.


SORRY for the blurriness of the picture that's not the same, the one immediately above. The sports Nazis of the NCAA won't let me bring my digital SLR with the long lenses into the stadium, and when you zoom in with an iPhone camera, you get what you get.

So let me tell you what you're seeing here. The Omaha policeman on the right is carrying what appears to be some permutation of an AR-15 -- an assault rifle. These officers are stationed right before you get to the ticket-takers, and you don't get more in plain sight than that.

It took me aback -- not that CWS security hasn't always been this heavy in our post-9/11 world, but that this year, in the era of ISIS and a week past Orlando, it seems to be more conspicuous  than ever. In your face, even.

I'm not faulting the local cops. I'm not questioning the security strategy. And I'm certainly not getting in the face of the cop with the military-grade firearm to get a better picture of his assault rifle. Besides, I look rather Mediterranean in this Age of Trump.

What I am saying is this is sad. Damned sad. It might be the right thing, but it is so, so wrong.

America's right-wing, gun-nut wingnuts don't want us to become just like those socialist "Euroweenies." Seen the security at the Euro soccer championships in France?

Looks to me like we just have.

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

We go on hurting each other, tearing each other apart


The United States has suffered -- yet again -- a horrible mass shooting. Another mind-numbing, soul-killing episode of domestic terrorism.

This latest, early Sunday morning, came as some madman of Afghan heritage and a Muslim upbringing shot up a gay nightclub in Orlando, killing 49 and wounding more than 50 others in the deadliest mass shooting in American history before an Orlando SWAT team gunned him down. The mass-murderer -- the terrorist who aimed to deal with homosexuals the same way Adolf Hitler did -- pledged his allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in a phone call to 911 dispatchers.

The atrocity's aftermath, unsurprisingly in these times, has been one of scapegoating, recriminations and outright mau-mauing on all sides. Unsurprisingly, our country's angry-ideologue class, along with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, have been in the middle of the national freakout.

Take your pick on whom to blame, because everybody's getting tarred so far. Our battered, crumbling American society is in a bad patch of its ongoing nervous breakdown, and American Conservative senior editor and blogger Rod Dreher ain't feeling so good himself:

Most conservative Christians I know find Donald Trump to be an excrescence. But as the attacks on Christians mount, and the campaign to demonize religious liberty as cover for hatred goes into overdrive, they will have to consider more carefully whether or not to vote for Trump as a matter of self-protection. As the AP story said:
Trump uses rhetoric that has resonance for Christian conservatives who fear their teachings on marriage will soon be outlawed as hate speech.
“We’re going to protect Christianity and I can say that,” Trump has said. “I don’t have to be politically correct.”
Every conservative Christian I know who has told me he or she is voting for Trump, despite everything, has said fear of what Clinton will do to religious liberty is at the heart of their decision. I get that. Boy, do I get that. And this week, it’s becoming ever clearer.
SO . . . what we're hearing is that, for fear that Hillary Clinton will open up a can of politically correct WhoopAss on believing Christians, it is somehow understandable and legitimate that allegedly believing Christians would cast their votes for a candidate who:
  • Actively and unequivocally encouraged violence against protesters at his campaign events

  • Clearly stated his support of torture — acts that not only are profoundly immoral but also are defined as war crimes in both domestic and international law

  • Differs not a whit from Hillary Clinton on abortion, based on his record and not his multiple campaign positions on the subject

  • Has reiterated his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, an act of religious bigotry that flies in the face of U.S. constitutional law and would, soon enough, be used against Christians once the forest of the law had been cut down and we had nowhere left to hide

  • Has called for the retributive mass murder of terrorists’ wives, children and families because “We gotta be tough.

  • Has used blatant bigotry and stereotyping to scapegoat and engender hatred toward Mexicans as a whole

  • Sought to bully a federal judge of Mexican heritage presiding over a lawsuit against him, deploying outrageously racist arguments in the process

  • Refused to immediately repudiate the support of onetime neo-Nazi and KKK grand dragon David Duke, and who regularly sends out rhetorical dog whistles to skinheads, Kluxers and all other ilks of alt-right refuse

  • Has refused to rule out using nuclear weapons in the Middle East and even Europe. Europe! 

  • Is a well-known moral degenerate who routinely denigrates women, this in addition to his entire adult lifetime of sexually using and objectifying them. (We are supposed to elect this as president of the United States because we’re freaked out over gays and the tragically gender-confused? Really?)

  • Has built a long “business resumé” of shady dealings, crackpot schemes, failed ventures born of sheer narcissism and, finally, alleged out-and-out fraud

  • Routinely bullies his political opponents

  • Routinely threatens his political opponents

  • Routinely makes slanderous and outrageous accusations against his political opponents, the latest being against the president of the United States when he insinuated Barack Obama was somehow in cahoots with Islamist extremists.
St. Maximilian Kolbe
I AM SORRY, but even thinking of voting for such a candidate won’t fly — not on grounds of one’s faith in Jesus Christ . . . not on grounds of one’s support of the United States Constitution and the rule of law.

That may mean that Christians are just f***ed in this election but this is the real world, and f***ed happens.

As for myself, I’d rather be honorably martyred under Hillary Clinton than live in dishonor under President Trump, effectively repudiating my Catholic beliefs as I shoveled moral excrement upon my Savior and my faith.

Friday, June 10, 2011

Orlando cracks down on 'terrorists'


Who knew that Orlando, Fla., was the front line in the War on Terror?

But it is. The city that Mickey Mouse built is waging a brutal, years-long battle against homegrown al-Qaida, ruthless enemies of society and the state pursuing a relentless course of . . . feeding the homeless.

The repeated attacks on public hunger, in blatant disregard of Orlando's ban on feeding the
animals homeless, have thrown central Florida into a state of panic and chaos, leading Mayor Buddy Dyer to use the phrase "food terrorists" to describe Food Not Bombs' vegetarian-chili ladlers.

ABC News outlines why Orlando is after Food Not Bombs -- part of the city's effort to create a nation of bombs, not food:
Members of the organization Food Not Bombs were in good spirits as they passed out corn on the cob, rice, beans and other vegetarian dishes to the homeless and hungry in an Orlando park. This cheer was interrupted when police officers on bicycles arrived and arrested five of the volunteers.

This is not the first time this scene has played out for members of Food Not Bombs.

Since June 1, a dozen members of the group have been arrested for violating a new Orlando city ordinance that prohibits sharing food with large groups in downtown parks more than twice a year.

The mayor of Orlando even branded them "food terrorists."

Food Not Bombs is an international political organization that protests war, poverty and the destruction of the environment, according to their website. The group meets to distribute food twice a week in downtown Orlando's Lake Eola Park.

They won a district court case to prevent the enforcement of the new ordinance, but the decision was overturned in the appellate court.

A spokesperson for the city of Orlando said that the ordinance had its origins in complaints from residents and business owners about trash left after the food distribution, public urination and concerns about crime.
THIS IS BECAUSE it would be so much more difficult for a couple of cops to patrol the feedings, keep order and prevent public peeing than it is to bring in maybe a dozen or so cops to raid a soup line, arrest all the servers, call in the paddy wagon and haul everyone off to jail.

But you gotta do what you gotta do. Because it's terrorism, you know.
Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer has been quoted calling the group "food terrorists." He told ABC's Orlando affiliate WTFV, "I think they are using food or the feeding of the homeless for different purposes."

Cathy Jackson, the executive director of the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida, agrees that motives may be more about self-promotion.

"The meal service that's being provided by Food Not Bombs is an unnecessary service," Jackson said. She says there are at least seven shelter operations within less than a mile and a half of Lake Eola Park that provide daily meal services for the hungry.
BUT ALL THOSE hungry people in Orlando -- the ones it's illegal to feed in public without a permit, and not more than twice in one spot in a year -- weren't at those shelters, now, were they?

The professionals weren't where the homeless were, either, and thus were not "connecting with those they are serving to channel them back into a direction of housing and self-sufficiency."
But the "terrorists" were, and at least those homeless folk got a little something to eat.

If this were about more effective means of helping the homeless, we'd see a public-private push to find the homeless where they congregate and bring them to where the food and the counselors are. But the Orlando law -- like laws all across America just like Orlando's -- isn't about addressing our "least of these" problem.

It's about addressing our "Why do we have to encounter the 'least of these' and be troubled?" problem. But what do you expect in a Mickey Mouse city run by a bunch of rats?

Basically, it's always 33 A.D. somewhere, and somebody is always getting what Jesus got for doing what Jesus did.