Well, Aristotle IS one of the fathers of rhetoric so who better to ask a rhetorical question, right?
It’s been a tough emotional week for me. Not anything personal in my own life but due to the events in Tucson. I love my country. I have loved it since I was a little kid and learned about George Washington. He was, and still is, in my opinion, the greatest public hero of any age.
I was 8 when JFK was killed. My parents loved him and worked for him. My father even ran for the Senate in 1962, inspired by him.
I was 13 when MLK and RFK were killed. I will never forget walking into a drug store in Darien, Connecticut after MLK was murdered and hearing a man say ‘that N***** deserved it’. I was 13 and as angry as I had ever been at that moment. I didn’t speak up and was ashamed afterwards. Since then I almost always speak up if someone says something grossly offensive.
I was 26 when Reagan was shot. I was not a fan of President Reagan but it had nothing to do with that. I respect my presidents. I start each term with each president just as filled with hope as if I were a naive young man.
I am now 55, will be 56 in a little over a week. It’s weird, it’s almost as if this event in Tucson hurts more than the others. I know Giffords is ‘just’ a congressional representative, not a president or candidate, but it’s almost because of that that it hurts more. She ‘represents’ and it’s as if someone was trying to kill that, not just a person. Add on to that that people who had every reason to believe they were doing something uniquely and gloriously American that day suffered death and injury for no other reason than they wanted to connect to their representative.
I love rhetoric and the power of words. I love how they can inspire us. I hate how they can turn us on each other. I hate how they can be used by selfish people for selfish ends. I hate how they can mask lies and evil deeds. But I think the power of good in words can overcome that power of evil. And I won’t ever give up believing that, ever.
The napkin above is light, it’s funny, it’s absurd. It’s rhetorical. I had to lighten my emotional load a bit by drawing it. Don’t forget though, that it is not a rhetorical question to ask if we can’t be civil with each other.
Drawing and commentary © 2019 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com
Quote by someone who is pretty funny.
>The reason it hurts so much (I was too young to remember MLK or RFK, but clearly remember Regan, I was a teenager at the time) is that an attack on one of our political leaders, is, in fact, an attack on our very way of life.
We believe in so many things that make us free and it is our political leaders charged with keeping us free.
Whether we agree with their politics or not .. the very fact that we can disagree is what makes it so very precious to us .. to take the life, or try to take the life of one of these people is to say that a voice does not matter.
Which means, our voice does not matter.
An assasination, successful or not, is a direct insult to our way of life. It hits close to home and is an insult to our very existance.
Peggikaye (twitter, met you today at the tweetup)
>Yes.