Politicizing grief

Anyone who reads my columns and blogs can tell you that it is one of my mantras that politics should take up as little space in your life as possible. If it doesn’t, it’s only out of necessity occasioned by bad government, something we have in surplus.

A normal, healthy person with a functioning conscience should recoil with horror at the gruesome murder of a dozen Americans and the wounding of 70 others in a crowded movie theater in Aurora, Colo. If you don’t feel that, there’s something wrong with you.

If your first reaction is, say, to get political, to condescend to our nation’s Founding Fathers about the fact that guns are instruments of violence, then there is most certainly something wrong with you.

The paparazzi treatment of the whole affair as a commoditized news story is, despite its hideousness, predictable. I had hoped that exploiting the innocent victims of a random and senseless act was not.

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