Rhetoric and Common Sense

Rhetoric is spilling all over the pages of American newspapers and flying over the waves of American radio stations and websites.
I don't want to add to it, but there is just so much we can absorb before the trip wires go off in the brain and we say, "Stop."
American politicians are not in the business of calling for assassinations and murder.
American politicians are not in the business of supporting physical attack as  a means of gaining political advantage.
American politicians are not in the business of calling for any and all measures to win their point.
This is as true for Republicans as it is for Democrats.
What we have witnessed in the past forty-eight hours seems to be the work of a mentally disturbed young man who exhibited enough signs of his troubled mind to be helped if anyone had been looking for signs. He was obsessed with ideas that apparently made no sense to those who heard him utter them. He was a "loner", whatever that bandied-about term really means, who could not find a place in his world and who did not seek or receive the psychiatric help that might have saved him and his victims. He had nothing at all to do with politics except for his deranged fixation on Congresswoman Giffords.
Let us pray for the victims of his disturbed mind and for him.
Let us strive to recognize those who may be like him so we can help them.
Let us renew our efforts to keep our political process open and available to all who want to participate for that is the foundation of democratic government and it brings with it risks, but they are risks well worth taking.
Please, above all, let us reduce the rhetoric. It serves no purpose but to clutter and deform the political process.