Let's all stay on the home planet, okay?

Hmmm... rants against Trump on Facebook. So have I.

""On his Facebook account, which came under attack from an angry public Wednesday, Hodgkinson lashed out more, railing against Trump and the Republican Party.

"“I Want to Say Mr. President, for being an ass hole you are Truly the Biggest Ass Hole We Have Ever Had in the Oval Office,” he wrote Monday on Facebook. That page and another that appears to belong to Hodgkinson were taken down after the shooting."


Participates in political protests... so have I (and have the tinfoil hat to prove it!)

"In 2012, Hodgkinson protested outside the Belleville post office to call attention to wealth and political inequality, calling himself part of the 99 percent, according to the Belleville News-Democrat. He carried a sign that read, “Tax the Rich Like Congress Did for 70 Years Till Reagan’s ‘Trickle Down.’”"


Volunteered in the 2016 presidential campaign... as did I.

"St. Clair County is surrounded by communities that voted heavily for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, but Hillary Clinton edged out Trump in St. Clair itself. Hodgkinson was a supporter of Sen. Bernie Sanders and had volunteered for his presidential campaign."


Wrote a series of letters to the editor... So have I.

""In a series of letters to the Belleville News-Democrat, he challenged GOP tax policies that he said helped the wealthy at the expense of the middle class. In November 2011 he called for higher taxes on the wealthy.

"I believe it's time for the 99 percent to demand that our Republican congressmen tax the rich like our great leaders of the past," he wrote. "Let's take back our country.""


Like Hodgkinson, I believe that I - as well as most other humans - have the capacity for violence.

(Don't be alarmed. I'd suck at it.)

If ever that aspect of my personality were to engage, I suspect the trigger would be an immediate, physical threat to myself, my family, my friends and - possibly even - complete strangers if I was close enough to intervene.

While I've been beaten up a number of times as a kid (including by my friends, usually for something I said :-) ), I haven't punched anyone since I was about ten years old.

I remember coming home crying because some neighborhood kid about two years younger than me was bullying me.

My "Golden Gloves" father said, "Why don't you just HIT him, for crying out loud?!"

"But what if I HURT him, " I bawled (one of a number of occasions where I baffled the hell out of him).

Nonetheless, the next time the kid bullied me, I punched him hard in the stomach. He doubled over, gasping and crying, and went home.

I hung up the gloves. So I'm 1 - 0. (I technically didn't LOSE the other subsequent times I got beat up because I didn't fight back. :-) )

This guy, on the other hand, seems to have engaged his inner propensity to violence on a number of previous occasions.

He also, in the end, crossed the mysterious line between thinking hard thoughts and ranting hard things - on the one hand - and shooting the targets of his wrath - on the other.

I suspect it has to do with my rock solid belief that killing people or even wishing them dead because of some political or religious abstraction, or even because they are causing harm in some concrete but less than lethal way, is the way of madness. And, whatever time I have left in this life, I'd like to spend it in reality rather than some delusional hero fantasy. Which cuts to the heart of my strident objections to Trump's embrace and celebration of factual nonsense.

Reality is important enough to fight for. But even that is not enough to kill for.

James Hodgkinson’s long descent into rage