tmatt says over at GetReligion that we’re all Waiting for the ‘why” shoe to drop.
I think the obsession with the story shows the one true a media bias (of leftists or rightists or even centrists) - whipping us up into a frenzy of useless emotion. CS Lewis said something about the distraction of reading the news from the real, local events in one’s life and world. Of course the same could be said of blogging :-)
But seriously, I don’t need to ask questions like “what part of Asia”. I don’t need to ask even “what race was he” or, as a liberal (like me) might read into the text of a conservative writer (like tmatt), “What part of Asia = What religion was he?”
From a religious point of view doesn’t all of this coverage just invite us to judge the killer, judge the victims and judge the survivors? I think so. Not a very healthy pastime.
Pray for the dead - may they Rest in Peace! - and for the living: pray that they will heal and forgive. Move on.
It’s on every news station right now - this is not bigger than Iraq or Iran or Dafur. We’re wallowing in a national kind of exculpatory self-pity by proxy. Sorry: we’re all still guilty of our regular sins.
At the risk of seeming to be horribly insensitive, I will point out that the tragedy of the Virginia shootings is duplicated almost every single day in Baghdad. No wonder Iraqis are leaving their “free” country at a rate of 50,000 per month.
As a nation, America has forgotten what hell looks like. (”War is hell” remmeber?) That’s probably why their leaders have been so willing to inflict it on foreign lands.
It’s not insensitive. It’s more directly saying what I wanted to say in my last paragraph.
Don’t yell at us about *that*: look at the terrible thing that happened to us!
But see also my most recent post from Boing Boing, “This tragedy says everyone must agree with me…” We need to step away from the emotional frenzy (caused by media, by patriotism, ect) before we can evaluate any of these things.