Thanks for another excellent post.

Carly Fiorina railed about Planned Parenthood killing babies to make profit by selling body parts. That was a lie. Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Bobby Jindal appeared at a conference chaired by a pastor who advocates execution of Gays and views the deaths of abortion providers as righteous retribution. Ted Cruz received the endorsement of the guy who authorized the faked video tapes Fiorina cited. The Cruz supporter believes that a just government would execute abortion providers. None of these people will be blamed for the deaths at the Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs. Think of what happens when police were stalked in killed in NYC and Texas. Black Lives Matter was implicated as setting the stage for the murders of the police.

The rhetoric had been stirred up to the point of having abortion provider groups request that the DOJ CLASSIFY arsons and other attacks on abortion clinics be classified as domestic terrorism. This request was before the attack on the clinic in Colorado Springs. The Right has gone crazy and the mainstream media is treating them with kid gloves.

Regarding the shooting at the protests in Minneapolis, the media response does prove that black lives don't matter. Literally zero coverage. As you are aware there was a Million Man March in August that received virtually no coverage by mainstream media. The protests against violence and crime in black communities are rarely covered. The media then criticizes blacks for not protesting urban crime. 

I don't think it's that we don't want to help Syrians, or anyone else in the world, it's that most of us, if we have any money left over, are more likely to give it to those in need we know personally, or to causes in our own country.  The needs are endless right close to home.

I understand your frustration about our seeming lack of humanity.  Besides all the incidences you cite, we're bombarded, for example, with the press's irrational celebration of Trump's head-long leap into fascism--as if we're watching a movie, with no cares once we leave the theater.

Even after all the talk about that terrible shooting at Planned Parenthood I saw the publisher of the New Hampshire paper endorsing Chris Christie talking about why he is their choice.  The first words out of his mouth were about Christie being pro-life and promising to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics.  Oh, and he's the best choice to take care of Isis.  Taking care of all the evils, in other words.

We do need to talk about our own home-grown terrorists, with the emphasis on why we let it happen.  It's more than just guns and mental illness, it's an entire culture, spurred on by a ratings-driven mainstream media, a rise in hateful old-testament religion, and the inclusion of rabidly anti-government "public servants" in local, state, and federal offices.

I wish I could say I'm surprised at the insensitivity and outright cruelty from those people trying to keep refugees out of our country, but I'm not.   We have to work at eradicating hate and instituting  kindness--not just giving it lip service but actually making it our policy.  Sort of like it's supposed to be.  

We're a mess, but you write beautifully,  Danny.  There's something to be said for that.

Being able to avoid conversation is a privilege in the sense that many people can keep a distance from problems and contradictions, maintaining a gateway community of the mind. The avoidance can also be understood as a dysfunction; the presence of an absence.

One indicator of the condition can be seen in the widespread acceptance of this statement by Margaret Thatcher (channeling Hayek):

"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

The passage has often been discussed in terms of the limits of political solutions but it is not primarily about that topic. The radical privacy expressed here does not merely advance the concerns and obligations of an individual above those of the "commons." The statement removes the individual as an agent beyond whoever he or she is able to influence personally. If one were to multiply this limited agent many by many times and force the result to live and work in close proximity to one another, the result would be a society of non agents who share the consensus view regarding their collective inadequacy.

So the problems of domestic violence are not seen collectively as a matter of policy because the sources are individuals growing up inside of individual families. The society of non agents can recognize that many of those individuals and their families failed and since Society does not exist, who does that leave to blame?

Case solved.