Aftermath of a tragedy

I seldom post blogs; I am loath to indulge in the narcissistic musings that clot the blogosphere, but I feel compelled to write in the aftermath of the slaughter of the innocents in Newtown, Connecticut. Twenty children were brutally murdered by a young man of 20. We will hear the calls for gun control, for psychiatric counseling, for medication monitoring, for rethinking protocols for committing the dangerously mentally ill; what we won't hear is the realization of a truth we will not accept because it is an existential threat. What we will not do is recognize the evil that exists in our own hearts and acknowledge our own culpability in this tragedy. We will not realize that the evil is not the other; it is our own.

A week ago one of my oldest and best friends died. For me, grief takes the form of stress and that in turn exacerbates my heart disease. My heart literally hurts with the loss of my friend. A curious phenomenon I have observed: he is more present in my life now that he is absent. 

Realpolitik

It is with great sadness and outrage that I acknowledge the murder of the American ambassador to Libya and three other diplomatic personnel on September 11th. These murders are reported to the president and he reacts- by attending a campaign stop in Las Vegas! North Africa and the Middle East erupt in violence; this is a time for leadership, Mr. President. You cannot deal with jihadis by acquiescence; you must project strength or they will perceive weakness and conclude that they can kill American citizens with impunity.

I begin this blog noting the media fixation on the tragedy in Colorado and the nervous hand-wringing in some circles to what should be simply a straightforward period of national grief. When incidents like this occur we react by questioning the effectiveness of gun control laws, by wondering if there were red flags that were overlooked, by pondering how anyone could commit such an act of senseless violence. Yet what is usually ignored is the obvious: we cannot now nor will we ever be able to prevent such occurrences. This is so because we deny the truth; we cannot fathom how anyone could commit such a crime because we fear to recognize that there is never a dearth of evil, that such horrors lie hidden deep within every human heart. This insecure man sought notoriety at the expense of human life; he stepped over the line that, fortunately, most of us draw.