Nessun Dorma

Woke up feeling like there needs to be more compassion in the world. Another shooting. This time in Arizona and the same stuff is being said on the forum as with the high school shooting in Omaha (which by the way happened at the school my sister teaches at).

People can't cope until they make everything distant. We want to blame someone. We want to make some kind of stand against this. We want to make all the real people involved in this tragedy nothing more than tropes of their former selves. The senator is just a senator in a sick story. The child is just a child. And the killer is just a nutjob. We could all get off so easily.

A few of my friends are up in arms about how political this is being made out to be. How people on both sides are blaming this killer for being from the other side. How sickening it is that we can't just understand that he was a crazy nutjob.

As if the flaw were in his logic or in his grasp on reality. He understood reality and the consequences of his actions enough to get a gun and kill people point blank. His logic may have been sick and twisted, but it isn't logic that makes a killer. It's lack of compassion, lack of love of life, plain and simple.

One of my friends went so far as to say that the response to the tragedy sickened him almost as much as the tragedy. That is how much this has become a distanced story rather than a reality. It's bullshit.

Hundreds of people who are outraged and traumatized enough by this event enough to practice their freedom of speech albeit in a haphazard way is actually somehow reassuring to me. Doesn't anybody else see it this way? Not my friend.

Somehow that practice of free correspondence by confused and sometimes very outspoken, but also honestly grieving and concerned citizens, can be compared to the point blank killing of innocent people? There's a leap in logic for you.

Logic will make fools of us all. It is a slippery little thing. But belief, specifically belief in the value of human life, downright compassion and empathy and feeling, would rarely let us kill. True feeling is what can save us from this mess. Seeing the situation as the situation it is. Seeing the killer as a f**king killer and not just another nutjob.

People are convinced that anyone who kills is crazy. I am convinced that many killers are too dependent upon logic and cold hard facts. Too many already see the taking of human lives as a logical way to raise attention for their sick causes.

That's another, and I would argue smaller, tragedy. He won. He isn't a killer, rather he's crazy to these people. And everybody is talking about what he wanted them to talk about. That's not craziness that led to these actions. That was passion for a cause rather than compassion for the people he was shooting. It was logic that failed here.

I am sick of logic being praised in this society. I am especially sick of emotion being suppressed. And I feel that the people on these forums are expressing genuine emotion, but they think they have to do it in these logical arguments against a specific evil.

Even I find myself turning this whole thing into a battle between logic and compassion versus the real tragedy it is.

I think that in the end the forum commentators I most agree with are the ones that state the obvious. This is a tragedy and all we can do is pray. What prayer means to each of us is different.

For me prayer is meditating on the reality of this situation in a state of empathy and trying to cope with it. To me the end thing I will take away from this is a renewed conviction that I need to spread forgiveness, peace, and (once again) compassion. For me I don't feel the need to blame anyone but the killer, and I definitely don't feel the need to excuse his actions in any way shape or form.

I don't know why I read all these comments. Probably because it is the perfect observation window into the human race. People judging people they never met, instead of coping with their own grief. I'm not saying I condone, but I do think it is a natural part of the grieving process.

It shows that in a world of increasing apathy these people care enough to spend some of their time talking about these issues with strangers.

Yeah, on one level people can be frustrating. But on another level this only shows that these people care and are trying their best to process and learn from these events. It's human. We need to not suppress our humanity. We need to embrace it. Or we'll have more and more tragedies caused by slightly unstable people, fed with faulty logic, and lacking a firm faith in the value of the human race.