All the corporations are pretending to be hyper sensitive to the church shooting tragedy, there has been a rush of some kind to blame the flag, although its a minor if any kind of factor in the issues of race in this country, especially in the south, Ferguson doesn't fly the flag anywhere and they have serious race issues. It's basically a marketing strategy under the guise of being supportive, its an old issue that many have seemed to hijacked the recent tragedy to push an old issue to the fore.
There has been a giant band wagon of support behind taking down the confederate flag at the SC state capital in front of a memorial, as its still seen by some like the nazi flag, or representation of a traitorous flag, for most, it represents slavery, so there is plenty of argument why its not appropriate in front of a government building. Personally, I think there are far worse crimes the U.S. flag represents (killing and past and current treatment of Native Americans, internment of Japanese, pointless wars that left millions of innocents dead in Iraq, Laos, Vietnam, the years of slavery under the U.S. government and the Presidents who owned slaves, etc) so there is a lot of hypocrisy in pointing out the issue with that flag and the history behind it. I lived in the south long enough to realize the issues with race are prevalent everywhere and has little to do with the flag, and hiding the history of it won't fix a crazy kid shooting up a historic church that had to fight for the right to worship during its inception in this country. I do think that its inappropriate to fly it in front of a government building, but wrong to use someone's tragedy as ammunition to push a long standing personal agenda that doesn't really fix why it happened.
> wrong to use someone's tragedy as ammunition to push a long standing personal agenda
Ugh. No one is using this as "ammunition." The shooting was a symptom of a problem. Acceptability of racism and pride in racist heritage are possible contributing factors to this problem. When the symptoms present themselves, it makes sense to use that opportunity as a reminder that the problems still exist and that we should take steps to fix them.
Although, we don't yet know what the problem is or if that's a symptom. If it is a symptom, then the flag is just another symptom.
I speak of course, that the knee jerk reaction wasn't even a day after the shooting based on people's misguided views and stereotypes of the south. Recent evidence points to the shooter having black friends, and talked of shooting up other places for non-racist reasons, so the whole race motivated thing could just be a ruse to gain notoriety. But sure, the flag thing is the most important thing the controversy loving media wants to cover since it distracts from the T.P.P. being passed, and waiting for all the facts to come in doesn't make for good ratings. Also, no reason to focus on the victims recovery from this tragedy, or the long history of the AME Zion church, or the struggles they've gone through in the past, focusing on the shooter is better.
It's totally ammunition, because its a side show, it has little tangential relationship to the actual event. It's grasping at straws to find a root cause we can fix.
> there has been a rush of some kind to blame the flag
This is the big thing that I just cannot understand. One day, someone kills several innocent people. The next day, the country is focused on it. And on the third day, we decided that a flag was causing white people to kill black people.
> One day, a white supremacist dude kills several innocent people. The next day, people are appalled that such racist ideology leads to mass murder. On day 3, people that have long been upset that a racist flag that the killer revered, that's representative of an ideology that was actively disenfranchising people on the basis of their race, is present on public buildings.
I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.
Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?
Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.
> I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.
Because psychopathic behavior is classified in our society as a personality disorder?
> Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?
No, but he did write a > 2,500 word manifesto (I'm not linking sources, this is all on Wikipedia) justifying his actions and stating that he knew what he was planning to do was morally and socially wrong and that the people he intended to hurt were innocent. He confided in friends, over a full week before he carried out his plans, what his plans were. That seems to me a cry for help by any standard.
> Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.
And that certainly stops the conversation and limits us from beginning to understand what is going on that is causing psychopathic behaviors to manifest. Calling it "merely evil" is dismissive. I'm much more interested in trying to understand what the hell is happening in our society by exploring the mental illness angle since it is grounded in medical science and not some nebulous "evil" or "insane."
edit/ I'd also like to say, I don't think it is minimizing mental illness to call mass murderers mentally ill. My own brother is diagnosed schizoaffective and I don't consider him a potential or future mass murderer just because of his health issues. That would be ridiculous.
I think defining it as "evil" or "mental illness" is really just semantics. The fact is, someone murdered innocent people in cold blood. You're minimizing the issue by shrugging it off as "some people are just evil".
And you're minimizing it by claiming the targeted killing of these people is the result of mental illness. I'm sure it's very comforting to try and say "This guy must have been mentally ill", but that defense seems to be uniquely brought up when a mass murder is committed by someone white. School shootings, church firebombings, church shootings - these are all the acts of the "mentally ill", and not "terrorist attacks".
Aside from the fact that it mischaracterizes mental illness, it serves no purpose other than to throw an entire portion of the US population who lives with some form of mental illness into the camp of mass-murderers, and gives those who have not yet committed a mass murder (but otherwise share the same extreme beliefs) an easy way to distance themselves from a heinous act.
Congrats - you've made sure we continue to think of those with mental illness as crazy murderers, rather that this individual was a product of a culture that dehumanized those different from himself.
Maybe it minimizes mental illness, but at least it's more of an attempt at a response than "he was just evil". What do you propose we do with the purely evil people? How can we detect them early?
Also I think it's kind of a stretch to say calling this mental illness is propagating a poor image for all mental illness any more than calling cancer deadly makes ALL ILLNESSES sound deadly.
There has been a giant band wagon of support behind taking down the confederate flag at the SC state capital in front of a memorial, as its still seen by some like the nazi flag, or representation of a traitorous flag, for most, it represents slavery, so there is plenty of argument why its not appropriate in front of a government building. Personally, I think there are far worse crimes the U.S. flag represents (killing and past and current treatment of Native Americans, internment of Japanese, pointless wars that left millions of innocents dead in Iraq, Laos, Vietnam, the years of slavery under the U.S. government and the Presidents who owned slaves, etc) so there is a lot of hypocrisy in pointing out the issue with that flag and the history behind it. I lived in the south long enough to realize the issues with race are prevalent everywhere and has little to do with the flag, and hiding the history of it won't fix a crazy kid shooting up a historic church that had to fight for the right to worship during its inception in this country. I do think that its inappropriate to fly it in front of a government building, but wrong to use someone's tragedy as ammunition to push a long standing personal agenda that doesn't really fix why it happened.