As the British journalist Dan Hodges observed in June, “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”
Since that massacre less than three years ago, there have been almost 1,000 shootings in the US at which four or more people were hit, and over 1,200 deaths. The most shocking thing about this week’s killing of nine people in Oregon was its ordinariness.
If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
-Noam Chomsky
If I had been a garbageman, I would have picked up more trash quicker and neater than anyone else ever had. If I’d been a reporter who got the chance to spend the day with Muhammed Ali, before I came to the interview, I would have thought long and hard about Ali the other reporters who had interviewed him before me. I would have reviewed all of their stories so that I could get a different perspective.
(from The Soul of a Butterfly)
Ideas come from the Earth. They come from every human experience that you’ve either witnessed or have heard about, translated into your brain in your own sense of dialogue, in your own language form. Ideas are born from what is smelled, heard, seen, experienced, felt, emotionalized. Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone. That’s the easiest thing on earth, is to come up with an idea. The second thing is, the hardest thing on earth is to put it down.
–Rod Serling, Creator of The Twilight Zone
