Is This Really How We Want to Live?

I live in a smallish Midwestern city and like most cities, we have festivals. Our summer festival is this weekend and it’s called Windmill Fest. You might ask yourself: why windmill? [Tiny history tangent coming!] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Batavia, Illinois was the US, and perhaps the world, windmill manufacturing giant! There were 3 windmill factories in town.

This year is different. This year the festival is fenced in. Previous years you could enter the festival from anywhere on the perimeter of the grounds. No longer. There is now a fence surrounding the entire festival. There is one, and only one, entry point.

Plus, the city has told us that all bags, including purses, will be inspected prior to entry. I don’t blame the city, or the police department, for increasing the security at the festival. It’s simply a commonsense reaction to crazy people with high-powered weapons in our midst.

Is this how we want to live? Were we asked? How come the rights of the minority of our population that wants to own weapons designed primarily to kill people in war override the rights of the majority of people who simply want to attend festivals in peace? How did this happen? How did the NRA come to own the Republican party? How did the Republican party, which does not represent the majority of the population, end up making almost all the rules and changing our lives for the worse?

There is a way to change this: vote the bums out. Replace them with people not beholden to the NRA and the MAGA philosophy that is ruining our nation.

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