He Said It Better Than I Ever Could

I don't always remember to read comic writer Steven Grant's weekly online column, Permanent Damage, because, while I tend to agree with his viewpoint more often than not, his targets are generally too obvious to be all that interesting to me. But every once in awhile he comes out and says something that impresses me simply because someone said it! Case in point in this week's column:

"Last week was practically a national orgy of pointless touchy feely twaddle, between the twin poles of "public mourning" for those shot at Virginia Tech and public outrage at how Alec Baldwin talks to his 11 year old daughter on the phone. And the one thing we're absolutely not supposed to say is: so what? Because, see, that's just not being sensitive.

Do we really need a week or more to mourn the victims at Virginia Tech? No one's arguing that it wasn't an awful event or a terrible loss of life. But do we really need day after bloody day of "news" reports telling us over and over and over things we already know, and telling us how we're supposed to feel - bad, very bad, traumatized even - instead of giving us any, you know, real information. Then in flood the Big Mothers trying to legislate behavior so that we can become a kinder, gentler people while the Compassionate Conservatives argue that the only thing that can save us is more police power, even if we have to give up a few liberties here and there to get it. The same bloody dance every time something like this happens while the fact is that almost none of us knew these people. Those who knew them, sure, they've got every right to mourn just as long as they want to, and probably many of them will do it in some way for the rest of their lives. The rest of us? They were nothing more to us than faces flashed by on a TV screen or printed in a newspaper and no more significant to most of our lives than any number of people who get shot or stabbed to death, or run over by cars or poisoned by their spouses or any other violent means anywhere else in the world, and it's not dishonoring the memory of the dead to remember that. There were people - parents, siblings, relatives, friends, co-workers, roommates, etc. - who were truly hurt by their passing and the rest of us do not deserve to claim any part of that pain.

Because that makes it about us, not them."

And while it's certainly not going to win any popularity contests to admit it, that's exactly how I feel about such things.