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Year Four, Day 180: Know the Enemy


Hi!

Not long to blog today. I am on my way to a meeting at my church job.

I am trying to pry myself away from Twitter.  The mass shootings of this weekend are weighing heavy on my soul.

My daughter scolds me for posting too many of my political opinions online. Since she and her husband are my friends on Facebook, I've wandered with my more liberal opinions over to Twitter. I feel more at home there. I've found I can hear many different sides of an issue with less memes and more raw emotion


I am a sucker for raw emotion.

I do understand where my daughter is coming from, however. Especially since she has a young child.

When my children were young, I gave away all my Stephen King and Dean Koontz books. I could no longer read horror novels when I had two precious lives that depended upon me. And the enormous pressure that the responsibility for them created would keep me up at night. Worries about health, strangers, finances, their school work, and social interactions were enough for me.  Monsters and evil people were enough to make me crawl in a corner and curl up into a fetal position.

When I became pregnant with my first child, I began to read the Bible for the first time in earnest. I was raised Catholic, before it was cool for Catholics to read the Bible.

I literally inhaled it!  I found such solace, curled up on my comfy chair, by the window overlooking the big fir tree.  Placing my hand protectively on my belly, the words of Scripture felt like cool water flowing through my being.

But now, I feel like being informed and learning about how evil works strengthens me.  With all the violence we potentially face each day, I want to be prepared. I have always dreamed about being a super hero.

In my studies the last few days, I have been focussing on mass shooters, their backgrounds and their similarities. I've been perplexed by the mass shooting epidemic in our country.

My opinions so far, which could change:

I know banning all assault rifles is not the answer. But I think it is a start. So are stricter background checks.

I don't think blaming this epidemic on  mental illness is correct.  From what I've read of some of the notorious mass shooters in the last 10 years, most of them were not deemed insane.  Evil and extremist, yes.  Insane, not usually.

Many of them planned and plotted for years.  Many of them had narcissistic personalities. Like Anders Breivik the Norwegian man who killed 77 people in 2011. His manifesto is studied by many extreme thinkers on the dark recesses of the internet as well as Brenton Tarrant and Dylann Roof.

I am not sure what I will accomplish with this research, other than arming myself with knowledge. Perhaps I will just quote Sun Tzu:

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle."
Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I do not want to bury my head in the sand, but on the other hand, I do not want to let real life horror destroy my life.  Fear can be paralyzing.  I choose knowledge, strength and love!

On that note, I have to run off to my meeting.

I am still going strong on my fasting. And my hooping!

I will talk to you tomorrow.


Love,

Zita


P.S. Here is an interesting article on white extremism and terrorism, if you are interested:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/opinion/new-zealand-tarrant-white-supremacist-terror.html

P.P.S. And here is my most recent hooping video. Day 123!





































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