CSotD: Snuffing such brief candles
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I have always had a visceral dislike for prolonged, outward mourning. In recent years, it has come from seeing how often a "commemorative issue" is no more than a cynical mask for piling up some single copy sales, but even as a 13-year-old nearing 14, I went outside and ran around the yard during JFK's funeral on TV.
It wasn't "insensitivity" or lack of sorrow. I'd simply had enough and needed something else.
So, yes, we'll mark the anniversary of the Newtown shootings. And by "we," I mean people other than me. But it doesn't mean I have forgotten, or that the mention doesn't stir me. There is no "wrong" way to mourn, and I suppose today's posting is mine.
However, I agree with Stuart Carlson. Remembering is kind of pointless when it isn't matched by some action that adds meaning and significance to all the TV specials, commemorative editions and displays of flowers, teddy bears and Mylar balloons.
And yet this is the action we got, as Adam Zyglis notes.
I heard an interview on NPR yesterday with the mother and older brother of one of the murdered children and, given all that I've just said on the topic, maybe you'll give it a read (or a listen) even if, like me, you'd just as soon not immerse yourself in a pointless tear-fest. It's not in the least pointless.
And, in the same edition of All Things Considered, Audie Cornish conducted their regular news-pondering session with EJ Dionne and, this week, Reihan Salaam, and asked them about the continued reverberations from the move to amend the filibuster rule.
Dionne responded:
First of all, I can't talk about Senate dysfunction without noting that tomorrow is the anniversary of the killings in Newtown and now we have this terrible killing out in – this terrible shooting out in Colorado. You know, I can't talk about this without noting the Senate passed, with a majority, a very mild background check bill supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans, yet it didn't pass because of the filibuster.
This reminder makes Zyglis's cartoon that much more spot on. "Out, out brief candle" indeed.
And to borrow from the same passage and to also reference Carlson again, we need, in our sorrow, to produce something more than "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing."
I also heard an anti-gun-control advocate voice the message that it isn't guns, it's mental health, which is both true and a load of garbage.
Mike Smith highlights the point: Which is the more troubling indication of our mental health crisis, the fact that this sort of thing keeps happening, or the fact that we allow it to keep happening?
Certainly, it's true that we should work to prevent the insane whose particular skewed vision makes them dangerous from getting their hands on weapons. That's true and it's also so absurdly obvious that it's barely worth bringing up.
Simply saying it without being willing to take any meaningful steps in that direction is what turns it into a load of garbage.
But, given that conservatives accept that crazy people with guns is an issue, we're at the point now where you put the possibilities on the table and, as in bargaining over the price of a car, the next person who talks loses.
Here's what is clearly, indisputably unacceptable: More dead children. And more gun deaths generally.
And so here are the choices (you may pick both, you must pick one):
Pragmatic gun control laws
Significantly increased funding for mental health
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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