On the massacre that occurred in Aurora, Colorado, earlier this morning, the most obvious thing to say is that the lives of the families and friends of those who were killed and wounded have been altered in an awful, nightmarish direction.
We all know evil exists, that life is fragile, and that people die. But the suddenness and scale of an event like this, in a country like this, is what shocks our system. And for all the efforts by the greatest theological minds in history to explain theodicy, nothing I have ever read or heard addresses it in a satisfactory manner. The “problem of pain” is something that some people might be able to wrestle to the ground when the issue is abstract. But when pain pierces our lives in ways we could never imagine, the neat, tidy explanations – that tragedy is the consequence of the fall of man, that God allows human beings to choose evil, and all the rest – often wash away like sandcastles on the edge of the ocean.
It isn’t that these explanations are necessarily wrong. It’s that they offer very little comfort to those besieged by sorrow. Because what we learn in time is that (to paraphrase the writer Chad Walsh) grief is the price of knowledge – not the knowledge of the mind but of the heart. It is the knowledge of friendship, of affection, of love. Those who live in the shadow of people’s love eventually live in the shadow of grief. Understanding this basic fact of life doesn’t make it any easier to endure. Bereavement can fracture even the sturdiest foundations of our lives.
But I want to say a word, too, about something Jonathan touched on in his post, which is the effort by some – in this case, by ABC’s Brian Ross — to attempt to politicize this tragedy almost as soon as the bullets from the killer’s gun had found their targets. (Ross mistakenly speculated, based on the flimsiest evidence, that the killer was a member of the Tea Party. ABC has since issued a retraction and an apology.)
This kind of politicization occurs in part because reporters on the air feel they have to comment on an event when they in fact have very little to say. It is also the result, I think, of an effort to draw some larger meaning from acts that often turn out to have no larger meaning. Sometimes they are what they are: the malevolent actions of poisoned minds. But part of it, too, is a reflex by some to fit a massacre like this into a preexisting political narrative. We saw it happen in the aftermath of the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School; the 2011 shooting spree near Tucson; and we will undoubtedly see it after today’s slaughter.
To be clear: there is such a thing as political violence. But what is troubling is the immediate assumption by some people, usually those who are part of the political class, that every massacre can be ascribed to political motivations. Acting on this assumption, they contort things in order to make them fit a convenient political template.
This effort to interpret everything through a political and partisan lens – to reduce everything to a political and partisan interpretation – is itself a disfigurement of reality. Life is a complicated and endlessly variegated thing. Politics has a role in all our lives; but for it to play such a dominant role in people’s imagination is surely not a healthy thing. And for people to immediately and instinctively take every human event – no matter how tragic and how painful — and place it in the maw of our politics is wrong and even repulsive. It exploits people’s sorrow and grief in order to score cheap political points and frame stupid political argument.
A modest and civilized society would give room to the families and friends of the dead to begin to process their shattering losses. It would give room to the police to do their work and gather evidence. It would leave room for citizens of this nation to reflect with soberness and seriousness on what has happened; to participate, if only for a brief time, in a national mourning of sorts. And it might even resist the impulse to leverage a massacre into a political culture war. It would be helpful if members of the press and politicians understood this, and acted in a way that showed some measure of decency and compassion.
The irony is that when the violence is clearly political or religious as with the Fort Hood massacre, the political class insists it's just a crazy person.
Wow, just a brilliant post. Superb. n nThank you.
Yes, good post. But please acknowledge that both sides do this, the left and the right. See Breitbart.com
It's been my impression that as mainstream media go, Ross is one of the more fair, scrupulous and careful reporters. I've seen even conservative commentators speak well of him and interview him. But this mind boggling overreach based on nothing disspells that impression, unless there emerges some explanation for this huge and bizarre error.
Oh really? Ross is the reporter who wrote the stories linking the anthrax attacks to Iraq. Although the administration denied such a connection, he persisted with information fed to him by his "high-level" source, information that later proved to be false. n nHe also did a report linking "runaway" Toyotas to design flaws. The demonstration he used in his report later was shown to have been staged. Toyota, naturally, demanded a retraction. n nThat's two I thought of off the top of my head.
The perp's mother is also disputing what ABC News alleges she said — when woken up at 5 AM California Time — and I can see a big distinction between confirming that you have a son of a certain name and age attending a certain college and what ABC alleges her to have said. n nPerhaps someone ought to wake up Brian Ross at 5AM and see how his jumbled not-quite-awake statements can be spun out of context. And if she truly was not surprised that he would do something like this, as ABC news implied, why would she be saying "I have to call the police" when they would be the last people she would want to talk to.
Thank you Mr. Wehner. n nI'm no fan of Mitt Romney the politician, but his statement today revealed Mitt Romney the person. He truly spoke from his heart.
I have put a 48 hour (ok, maybe 24 hour) rule on myself for postiing anything about this on my various blogs, but that does not extend to Brian Ross. His and ABC's retraction and apology are not good enough.His tagging a completely different man on the basis of the same name and being a Tea Partier is completely unprofessional. He needs to go … for this, and as an example to encourage the other old-news media to stop casually sliming Tea Party citizens.
I would settle for a multi-million dollar defamation suit by the defamed-by-misidentification individual (whom I believe now is receiving police protection — that costs some government entity money and *they* ought to be reimbursed by ABC News for this expense). Legal liability gets corporate attention — I usually am not a fan of the trial lawyers assn and these multi-million dollar suits but this is one case where it truly would be appropriate. n nPerhaps a better route would be the local law enforcement entity filing a formal complaint with the FCC against the local ABC affiliate for airing Mr. Ross's incorrect identification and asking that the local station be required to pay the police overtime (or perhaps loose its broadcast license outright) — that would get people's attention and all of the local affiliates would be making it clear to the network that they didn't want this happening to them and to be damn careful not to do it ever again. n nTV stations can and have lost licenses before — back in the 1970s, Boston's WHDH Channel 5 lost its license and WCVB has had Channel 5 ever since. Even the outright firing of Brian Ross is not going to fix this politicized knee-jerk impulse — CBS fired Dan Rather and the rest and folk still do this — but a local affiliate either loosing its license or having to convince the FCC not to yank it very well might.
What Brian Ross did followed in the steps of another liberal journalist, Dan Rather, who on Nov 22, 1963 before Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested, suggested to CBS viewers that the shooter was a right winger – in spite of suggestions from his producers that he wait until more was known about the Who,What, Where, Why process of "journalism".
I think what Ross has done is demonstrated just how even a mere hint of a suggestion that a perp is a conservative is more than enough to tar and feather the political right. This is in sharp contrast of how anything from the political left is ignored completely, no matter how very clear the evidence actually is.r nr nThe truth is Brian Ross so no downside to slandering the tea party. And there will be few repercussions for him.
Actually, there will be — Brian Ross has some really good sources in National Security stuff and has done some good pieces — but from now on he will always have the asterisk of "who falsely accused someone twice the age and of a different race of being the CO shooter" and I don't think any of us are ever going to forget that. Nor, I suspect, will his sources, who well might dry up a bit.
While Mayor Bloomberg showed himself as the fascist scumbag he truly is.
How long before we see from the White house:r nu201cIn lieu of flowers or other memorials the Obama campaign suggests earmarking gifts for the Re-election of the President.u201d
And for all the efforts by the greatest theological minds in history to explain theodicy, nothing I have ever read or heard addresses it in a satisfactory mannerr nr nPerhaps you should try some non-theological minds.
The probablility that some media hack would mistakenly blame a tragedy like this on a member of the "Occupy" movement or any lefty group is exactly zero.
The product of layers of fact checkers, no doubt.
Pointless, meaningless, sudden violent death strikes fear into people and they naturally and instinctively bat for ways to bring such situations under more control. Unfortunately, in this case the most obvious remedies — more gun control, letting citizens arm and protect themselves, committing psychologically unstable — are all politically controversial, so any discussion of these will naturally end up in a political debate. In nothing else, this is a testament to how much our government has managed to embed itself into our daily lives. So much, that few topics can be discussed without having to take political sides.
I'll accept that ABC News issued a retraction, but "…ABC News and Brian Ross apologize for the mistake, …" is not an apology. What he should be doing is apologizing for the bigoted assumption that this horrible crime was committed by a Tea Party activist and for immediately trying to turn it into a political event. n n n
A good point not said enough. The overuse of the word "mistake," as in "mistake in judgment," is scandalous and amounts to no more than evasion. n nA mistake is something along the lines of identifying San Francisco as the capital of California. That is not what happened to Brian Ross, who accomplished exactly what he intended to at that moment, which was to connect the Tea Party, and by implication Republicans, to the killings in Colorado. n nABC News' issuing an apology for "a mistake" compounds the felony and, in my opinion, is grounds for demanding another apology.
Or mistaking Concord, NH for Concord, MA? — As Michelle Bachmann did last winter…. n nFolk outside New England don't realize just how compact this area is, that NH is only 18 miles "wide" — that there is only 18 miles of I-95 between the Maine and Massachusetts borders. Or that the two Concords are only about 50 miles apart. n nOh, no, the media made a big issue of this mistake — which really is no different than putting Fargo in the wrong one of the Dakotas (which I have heard about happening on fake IDs) — or mistaking San Fransisco for Sacramento — and I think it shows who is allowed to make mistakes and who is expected to be perfect.
Minor nitpick:eExplanations are not meant to comfort. They are meant to illuminate. That's why God does not command us to be smart (tho' being wise — not quite the same thing as smart or rationale — is surely a Godly virtue). God commands us, rather, to be compassionate. Compassion, not reason, comforts. We show compassion by holding the bereaved in our thoughts, prayers, and most of all by being present and taking on whatever burden they might allow us to shoulder. n nI do not mean to diminish this excellent post in any way. Good job. n nBlessings, nMichael
What is reprehensible about Ross and Stephy is that this was the immediate investigation they did: Googled “James Holmes + Tea Party.” Without doubt, that is where Ross went first and eagerly, hoping to find the Tea Party–and by extension Mitt Romney–guilty of and discredited by this heinous crime. He thought he found the Cross he could use to repel Romney, and that is why he rushed it onto the air without the least little bit of fact checking. It confirmed what he wanted to find, and so he had his scoop and his service to his ideology.
Ross just misspoke. He meant to say D-party as in democrat and got his letters mixed up. They sound the same.
I'm trying to recall, but I honestly don't remember one act of violence actually committed by a tea party person. I actually don't remember a "proven" act of racism from a tea party person. So, you'd think that, given the history of the tea party, that would be the last assumption anyone would make. It's just not a credible accusation, given the history of the tea party. Am I wrong? Did I miss something?
A very thoughtful piece. n nI'm sorry, but the assumption of the media elites in this country is not that mass violence is political, but that such violence is linked to conservatism. Either that, or these people's first impulse is to search out ways to create the impression of such a link, which is truly abhorrent. n nIf this attempt at linking the massacre to the Tea Party hadn't happened on a show associated with a Leftist political operative (George Stephanopoulos), it might look more like a mistake and less like amoral political opportunism.
The thing that bothers me most is that the media — once it gets past the tabloid hysteria and grotesque pictures of the trail of blood along the sidewalk exiting the theater — will simply forget this story and go on to the next. Neither the true heroism nor the underlying causes of this will ever be told. n nThere undoubtedly was some real heroism here — the blood trail ends not because the people died but because the arriving police officers ignored protocol and decided to "scoop & run" — rushing victims with uncontrollable bleeding to the hospital in a police car because they weren't going to live long enough for the ambulance to show up — and undoubtedly lives were saved. We won't hear about this… n nThe classic picture from the Virginia Tech shooting is four middle-aged officers, with "heart attack" written all over their faces, rushing a male victim across the field, carrying him by his arms & legs. Not so widely known is that this fairly hefty guy, a former Eagle Scout, had been shot in the leg and had used a computer cord as an improvised tourniquet to stop/slow the bleeding — and not only lived but I believe didn't loose his leg. Did the names of these four genuine heroes ever appear anywhere in the media — I don't believe so. n nThe other thing that we won't hear is how the universities are pushing kids over the edge — arguably engaging in psychological malpractice and then dumping these people on society. I find it very significant that perp's life appeared to come apart after taking a course on abnormal psych and I want to know what else was done, if there were ad-hoc demands that the student seek treatment for perceived mental illnesses or any of the other things I am hearing to be chillingly common on college campuses — if he voluntarily left the university or if he was pushed out. There is talk of a "remediation" plan for his low academic scores, what else (i.e. psychological treatments) might have been involved in it – and would that pass the "smell test" if publicly known? n nAll I can say is this: Judge Buckley, who wrote/sponsored the Buckley Amendment/FERPA, personally told me that it expires with the student's death. Yet Virginia Tech is resisting media inquiries into the perp's conduct and judicial records which makes one wonder what they might be trying to hide. And what I hope the media does here is not just say "he went crazy" but do its due diligence and look into why and what might have pushed him over the edge. n nPerhaps Brian Ross can redeem himself by doing some real investigative journalism…