Assassins

Like the room in the photo above, a messy topic. And it has zero to so with real estate, but a lot to do with the country where our real estate is located.

Did you hear about the second assassination attempt on Trump? Maybe someone will actually get him yet and save the country a lot of trouble. He doesn’t need to worry about me: this is musing on my part, not wishing. I’ll give the guy credit, he remains unfazed. Me? I might decide the job wasn't worth the risk.

For more than a year I have been thinking of assassinations, fully expecting it would be Democrats killed because the Trumpets have (nearly) all the crazy gun-owners in their camp. Statistically, being president is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. Makes mining look like child’s play. 4 dead out of less than 50; that’s nearly 10%. What job carries a 10% chance of violent death within a 4 year period? (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy, in case you did not remember.) Then think of how many unsuccessful attempts were made: Washington, Jackson, TR, FDR, Ford, Reagan, Bush and Obama. I don't know if the ones on Trump count as they were attempted when he was not president. Were all the would-be assassins in the last group all successful, there'd be 1 in every 4 presidents murdered while in office.

And all the assassinations and attempts were by gun. No knives, no strangulation, no poison like they used against the Roman emperors. Those guys didn’t have guns back then, which probably saved a lot of Emperors. Now, check the time periods between Presidential attempts and you see a definite acceleration, one which parallels the proliferation of privately-owned weapons of individual mass destruction. I'd expect you’d find parallel statistics when studying mass killings throughout history.

Going right along with this was the rise of social media. People no longer know their neighbors in the same way. The people you associate with in a friendly way are less about to be geographically close but are more likely to be associated with you due to common interests. And now you may never have met many of them, so you only know them through their on-line presence, which may not be the same as it appears to people who actually see them. The gist of this is that we are being fragmented, losing real personal relationships for on-line ones and we are less apt to know each other as people. We associate more and more with only those who think the way we do, so we tune out other's opinions when they don't agree with our own. People with differing opinions you’d still respect as friends and neighbors in previous times; these are now less relevant.

It's human nature to be influenced by the opinions of those you associate with, the people you see and interact with the most. But with social media, work-from-home jobs, computers taking over other jobs and so on, and less what used to be normal human interaction -  all of use lose from this.

So I am seeing several trends pointing toward an unpleasant end to our society as we now know and envision it. I have enough of a background in history to understand that pendulums swing in two directions and this allows me to sleep at night - some, anyhow. So I worry during the day.