I wonder just how devastated David Hogg really is.....

Hogg is a survivor of the Marjory Stoneham Douglas high school shooting in Florida and has stepped up as some sort of a student leader type. He's part of a new student organization named 'Never Again MSD'

Of course he did survive the shooting and he may very well be devastated by the experience. I would probably be pretty shook up about it, myself.

Still, I wonder how he REALLY feels. He's spoken out and organized and seems to be in the spotlight but I can't help wonder if he is a true believer or just an opportunist that has decided to use the shooting as his way of getting his fifteen minutes of fame.

He may very well think that the shooting is the best thing that has ever happened in his life. On the other hand he may well be devastated. Then again it may be a little of both.

A lot of people that read this will be appalled at how I could think such a thing. It's easy. I've seen enough of that kind of two-faced crap in my lifetime.

Hogg needed this violence to gain his national attention the same way Al Sharpton and David Duke need racism to continue their lifestyles.

Had the shooting never happened nobody would even know who David Hogg is. If racism disappeared overnight then Sharpton and Duke would be fighting over a job at the car wash. 

I am not saying anything either way about Hogg as far as how his feelings go. What I am saying is that instead of instantly taking a knee jerk reaction support of him I want to know what he is thinking first.

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I caught a bit of hell on Facebook because I pointed out that the kids that recently marched for gun control were probably eating Tide pods a week earlier.

My shipmate, a fairly astute guy, commented that if you asked half of the marchers what they were marching about they would have answered, "I dunno...I guess it's somethin' about guns."

Some of the walkout protests reported violence and/or vandalism. Some of the students that supported the 2nd Amendment were mistreated by school authorities, Others reported that they were being encouraged by their teachers, a possibly illegal but clearly unethical thing to do.

Back in the days of the college protests against the Vietnam war the protesters consisted of maybe a handful of true believers, a bigger group of semi-believers and a boat load of people that hopped on the bandwagon to be cool.

The truth of the matter is not too many of the college kids were going to wind up in Vietnam as grunts in the mud. Many had parents with money and pull that could afford college and maybe a job with a deferment when they graduated.

Some kids did owe Uncle Sam some time for using ROTC scholarships. There were generally working class kids but generally those that took a Navy ROTC class wound up sleeping in warm bunks, with some exceptions. A handful did commission in the army and Marines and were assigned platoons in Vietnam but not a very large percentage and the truth is they were all volunteers.

Still, Vietnam for the most part was a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. Most of the college kids that were griping were not going to go to Vietnam anyway.  Half of college students were female and draft exempt. As for the male half, there were rich parents with connections for an awful lot of these students. Most of them didn't have to protest as they already has ways figured out to avoid military service. The thinnest book in the library could very well be the list of people that served in Vietnam named Taft, Rockefeller, Kennedy, Cabot, Lodge or Roosevelt.

Yet any number of young people managed to get their names in the papers and achieve notoriety and/or fame by joining the antiwar movement. Is Hogg using the shooting to get his fifteen minutes of fame? No telling either way. Personally I think he very well may be but that's just my instinct.

Let's look at the high school shooting statistics in real life. While a mass shooting is a terrible thing, the reality is that the odds of being killed in a school shooting are about 1/2,273,000. To put this in context the chances of anyone (including students) getting killed by lightning is about 1/700,000. A kid is three times more likely to be struck by lightning than killed in a school shooting. 

The scary part about it is that it's loud, violent happens fast and is unexpected and captures the media attention for days until something as scary or scarier happens. The media will come up with controversial solutions and carry on that something ought to be done but deep down inside the media doesn't want to stop another school shooting. They need things like that to keep the viewer's attention. That way they can keep their advertising rates up and get top dollar from advertisers.

Say what you will, but follow the money.







To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY