One of the drawbacks of getting your news online is that many of the website news sources allow room at the end of each news story posted for comments.  People read the news report and then express their opinion on it.

Sometimes, this feature can stimulate serious and intelligent debate on, say, political news or news from the war or news of what our government is or is not doing.

But with events of this past week, the first thing that struck me was that even tragic news--within moments of its breaking--seems to be regarded by many as yet another platform for their rage. 

Within hours of the terrible and tragic school shooting, not only were people lining up on opposite ends of the gun control debate, but real journalists and various movers and shakers of our society were already started to post blog entries on partisan websites, aided and abetted by irresponsible talk show hosts on radio--one of whom, upon learning that the gunman had been "Asian" but knowing nothing else, announced to millions that he was "probably a Paki" and "part of a terrorist cell."  ("Paki" being a derisive term for Pakistani.)

What on earth???

Have we all lost our collective minds?

Over on my Talking Points Memo blog, I posted an entry called, "Can We Just All Take a Minute?" in which I said that, at the very least, we all needed to pause, take a breath, remember that an appalling number of college kids and their teachers had died that very day, that many of them were still fighting for their lives in surgery, that some of the families had not yet been notified. 

Perhaps, I suggested, we should stop a moment and say a prayer or at least have a respectful moment of silence before we started fighting amongst ourselves over peripheral issues.

Over on Huffingtonpost.com, a blogger from a religious website, Jim Wallis, apparently felt the same way.  At Huffingtonpost, he posted a blog called, "A Time for Prayer and Silence."

He quoted a powerful editorial from the Los Angeles Times:

"If only it were true that Monday's mass murder on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was the kind of tragedy that moves us to quiet reflection.  In fact, the shootings that killed more than 30 people and wounded nealry 30 others occasioned a blizzard of hasty conclusions, instant position-taking and the rehashing of old arguments.  For the sake of the dead, for the sake of the living, and even for the sake of honoring this grim milestone--the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history--we should remember that there are times when silence is the best response.

"...Now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event."


Wallis concluded his own reflections on the editorial and the tragedy by saying:

"Along with the rest of our country and the world, all of us...send our condolences and prayers to the famlies and friends of those who died, and to the entire Virginia Tech community.  We pray the comforting presence of God will be felt in the midst of this unexplainable tragedy."


Now, you would consider such compassionate remarks to have been met by brief comments of support.  You would consider that many others would respond in a like manner.

Wouldn't you?  I mean, WOULDN'T YOU?

Instead, here is a representative sampling of some of the first 15 comments Wallis received:

"Trying to comprehend this tragedy and piece together details is difficult enough.  We don't need it interrupted with religious superstition, making even more nonsense to sort through.  Your sky-god friend didn't help much Monday.  I don't think he'll be of any help now either.  And if your "god" is powerful enough to provide a "comforting presence" then he was certainly potent enough to prevent the massacre from happening in the first place.  Either invisible sky-god is a delusion or he's a huge asshole."

and

"What is truly "senseless" is not the tragic events at Virginia Tech, but rather the fact that our society condones the manufacturing, sale, marketing, and glorification of guns and violence."

and

"The weight of the offense, the rotten meaninglessness of it"--should not reference the killing, but rather the sick society that breeds such behavior!"

and

"Unfortunately, silence and prayer were not what the University offered.  I had a difficult time watching the 'Go Hokies' rally at the basketball stadium.  Thank God they didn't show the kegger that preceded it."


When I read these callous, insensitive remarks, I clicked on the "comment" button, but found that I was simply too overwhelmed to know even where to begin.

Back in the fall of 1998, our Aggie family experienced the horrific tragedy of the collapse of the gigantic Texas A&M University bonfire structure that the students built every year--up to 100-feet high--for the University of Texas football game. 

Twelve kids died that day. 

My son was a student at A&M at the time, and my husband was an Aggie-ex.  My son and nephew had both been working on "the stack" just an hour or two before the collapse, and my son and his Corps of Cadets platoon helped pull logs off the massive pile-up.

This was like a death in the family to Aggies everywhere.  Like thousands of others, we drove down to A&M to comfort our son and to participate in a candlelight memorial service where thousands of students poured out of the dorms and gathered at the site, spontaneously singing, "Amazing Grace."

It was a sight I will never forget.

My son also attended a memorial service at the university in its sports coliseum, and one of the most powerful and moving moments of the evening--that was written about in op-eds all over the country--was when more than 50,000 young people linked arms and sang the Aggie War Hymn, which is the traditional song performed at every yell practice and football game. 

At the end of the song, all the Aggies link their arms and sway back and forth, singing, "Sawww varsity's horns off..." a reference to the mascot of the University of Texas.

Recently, I saw a two-page spread photograph in Newsweek magazine of the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, locking arms with Aggie Corps of Cadets members and swaying to the War Hymn at a football game, while he was president of the university.

Just last weekend, we attended an Aggie wedding, and at the reception, after the bride and groom cut the cake, everybody linked arms and sang the War Hymn--quite a sight of that girl in the beautiful white gown, singing her heart out with her Aggie groom.

What that moron who criticized those kids who yelled Hokie cheers at the rally did not understand is that THIS IS THEIR WAY OF HONORING THEIR LOST CLASSMATES.

How could anybody be so stupid as to criticize ANYTHING those grieving students choose to do in their own memorial service?  And the comment about the "kegger" was just plain ignorant.  There were so many tens of thousands of people who came to the service on campus that, when the coliseum filled up, the stadium next door filled up and the service was televised on the scoreboard.

Are we supposed to assume that all those people had gotten drunk before attending?

And the comments, directed toward Mr. Wallis about his "sky-god" being worthless to help--how on earth is that in any way appropriate under the circumstances?  There are all sorts of places online to debate the existence of God.  What this man was trying to do was inject a note of compassion into his words, trying to get everybody to realize that this was a terrible, awful tragedy. 

The country mourns.  Save your arguments for later.

And he was attacked for it.

This is one of hundreds of similar situations, but I'd like to quote from another.  Again, this appeared on Huffingtonpost and was written by Bob Geiger.  It was titled, "Bush Dishonors War Dead By Using Their Families."

In it, he pointed out an outrageous fact that had bothered me, too, and that was that when Bush gave his speech this week where he was attacking Democrats for, basically, hating the troops, he used as his backdrop set-piece for the cameras, families of the fallen.

I can't even put into words the contempt I feel for his craven, reptilian habit of constantly parading troops and the families of the dead to back up his political positions, while at the same time, hiding the flag-draped coffins from television cameras and forcing the amputees and mortally wounded to fly into Dover Air Base in the depths of night. 

Our great president has made a policy of hiding the horrors of this war from the beginning, and after four years of suffering, it is reprehensible that he would continue to stoop to this level.

Bob Geiger felt the same way:

"The Bush administration lied our country into a war and has kept us there longer than we were involved in World War II--and things are getting worse there every day.  the American people have turned against this war and want OUT, while our Chickenhawk-in-Chief uses the families of dead troops to pressure all of us to follow his miserable failure with more loss and more deaths.

"It's also time for the White House to quit dishonoring our war dead by using their families as pawns to force the death toll even higher and creating more Gold Star Moms."


There were two comments that struck me as tasteless, and both from opposite sides of the issue.  One tried to be flip and clever and only succeeded in being deeply offensive:

"Give Bush a break!!!  He sees how wonderful 'Gold Star' moms are and he just wants to make more of them!!!  I mean, really, doesn't everyone want a 'Gold Star'?"

The other spouted rhetoric that is familiar to me, but after four years, I find it so insulting and hateful and disregarding of those of us whose families are making these sacrifices that I can hardly contain myself:

"I didn't find it disgusting at all.  In fact, I thought it was quite inspiring.  That we are trying to ensure that they didn't die in vain is a noble cause.  Certainly better than cutting and runnning and leaving all the innocent people to the mercy of the terrorists.  What's really repulsive is the liberals who didn't have the guts to oppose the war originally, but have done evetything in their power to give aid and comfort to the enemy so they can blame defeat on President Bush.  It's time for liberals to quit spitting on our war dead and start supporting our war effort and our president."

EXCUSE ME?

SPITTING ON OUR WAR DEAD?

I'd like to know just how many condolence letters that asshole has written to the mothers of children who died while fighting with his son.  I'd like to know how many grieving parents' eyes he's looked into.

I'd like to know how he would feel if one of his own children headed out into that holocaust for months on end, going out every day, driving over bombs, getting shot at, helping buddies who get "blown up" and lose body parts stay alive until the medivacs can get them out.

But the bottom line is this.  If there is one thing the whole Don Imus thing brought to our attention, it is that there is this hateful, spiteful level of personal attacks that goes on under the radar of our society each and every day.

In the Internet community, there are people who, when they express opinions others don't like, can find themselves stalked, harrassed, have death threats sent to them, cartoons of them hanging or being raped, have their social security numbers posted, and similar unwarranted attacks.

It's gotten so bad, in fact, that a group of website managers have gotten together to create a Code of Conduct that spells out offensive behavior that has no place on blogs, and has encouraged website owners and managers to screen out behavior that is abusive.

I've said again and again and again ever since the Oklahoma City bombing, that this level of rhetoric has GOT to tone down because we don't know where the next disturbed young man or woman is sitting, soaking in the rage, before he goes and buys guns, magazines that hold extra bullets, boxes of ammo, and heads out to kill.

Opinions are fine.

Compassion is essential if the human race is to survive.

There is nothing wrong with possessing strong opinions--I'd be the first to say that.  And there is nothing wrong with being angry, as I have been from the day this war began.  And nothing wrong with expressing that anger in the proper forum.

But it would seem to me that this is all ANYBODY does any more!  They go around with their outrage perched on their shoulders, and their psychic hair-triggers are so damned sensitive, their opinions so cocked and loaded and ready to go at the first provocation...

That somewhere, somehow, we have lost our compassion, our empathy, and our simple, stark, honest, and grieving respect for the dead.