Hi from an old Arcadia student who likes to know that you’re still around someplace.

i agree…

You wrote that Obama was the first to make an “indirect” pronouncement that “in a sense we are all guilty.” You provided no link to his remarks, which as best I can determine, were made in Milwaukee the day of the massacre. I did find the text of the speech at realclearpolitics.com. You might want to read it to find out what he did say — directly and indirectly.

You related what you thought Obama said to a reader’s comment in a column by Dr. Thomas Sowell, not only providing the link but quoting the reader’s glittering generality about “liberals.” I read the entire column by Dr. Sowell and I noted several generalities comprising a diatribe against “the left.”

I take issue with the person who says that “liberals hold us individually responsible for nothing…” I know enough “liberals” to know that not to be true of them. Most I know have just as much individual integrity as the conservatives I know.

I note that Dr. Sowell doesn’t have any links for the assertions he makes so assuredly. For instance, he says, “That is what environmentalism – and much else on the political left’s agenda – is really all about, self-congratulation.” In my opinion, his own writing is the best evidence for its title: “Ignorance [is] no bar to strong opinions.”

Just for the record — and perhaps for your enlightnment — I quote what Barack *did* say about the killings. He quoted a speech by Bobby Kennedy after Martin Luther King was murdered in 1968:

‘Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily … the whole nation is degraded. … Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.”

Barack then said that RFK’s remarks in 1968 were applicable today. Do you say that they are not? Are we not all degraded when 33 are murdered at a university and over 3300 GIs are killed in a war that we can’t get out of because the reasons for being there and the definition of “winning” keep changing? We *are* collectively responsible and the individual who stuck us there and his cabal are each individually responsible. And we as individuals are too, for letting ourselves be flummoxed.

You had a liberal — you capitalize it, perhaps referring to some cult (?) — say to you “We are all God” — and said that you “took that to be a collective personal conclusion.” Pardon me, but what on earth does that mean? Many of us are Christians and believe that we do have an “awesome responsibility” to our fellow human beings (see the Sermon on the Mount, the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and Matthew 25 for starters).

Since you admit you are guilty of forgetting some of the tenets of liberalism (I use the lower case), I hope I have reminded you of some of them.

Feel free to reply. Thank you.