Category: The Dish

One Reminder

Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police force that was far too small to even respond to most of them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been murdered or not.

This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT campus police chief and university president for misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having destroyed the institutions of order in their country? Now go watch John Bolton tell the victims to go help themselves.

The Massacre, Ctd

We now know the murderer, although not the full motive. We also know the contours of the debate that will now rage. It seems an obvious misjudgment, to say the least, not to have had a more aggressive, immediate response to the first shooting. As for gun control, the debate shifts, I believe, when we’re dealing with a campus. Whatever the pros and cons of gun control in general, I find the idea of a place of learning being filled with students carrying concealed weapons to be a deeply disturbing idea. It is the antithesis of civilization.

The Massacre

Vtwinmcnameegetty

Absorbing the horror today – and the conflicting, complicating, shifting stories that keep emerging – is the kind of thing that makes you want to get the news a week after the event. There is so much we don’t yet know about the Virginia Tech massacre, so much that keeps changing, so much to be angry about, and to be terribly sad about, that catching up, let alone opining, seems simply inappropiate. I know it’s my job, but blogging breaking news like this is something I don’t want to do. I don’t even know what to have an opinion about. They’re having a vigil at VT tomorrow night and some have had impromptu ones already, as above. "Vigil" seems the right response right now. Praying and watching. Blogging later.

(Photo: Sixteen year-old Jessica Hill takes part in a vigil for the victims of the mass killing at the southwestern university, Virginia Tech April 16, 2007 in Blacksburg, Virginia. More than 30 people were killed after a gunman opened fired first at a dormitory and later a classroom building. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Former Segregationists for Obama

It’s a trend:

You can definitely be sure from my e-mail address I’m not an Obama staffer, but I have a similar story to that of your earlier e-mailer. My dad grew up in Macon, Georgia in an all-white school he describes consistently as having gone to hell thanks to integration.  He has never been personally racist to anyone of any background in his life, but he really thinks the world went to hell starting about 1960 and that civil rights went too far too fast. His dislike for the Sharptons and Jacksons of the world couldn’t be fiercer. The N-word is pretty much the standard noun many of his family members use to describe black people. His only vote for a Democrat in his lifetime was for Carter, out of Georgia patriotism.

I had the fun experience of watching Obama’s electrifying 2004 convention speech with him.  My dad, who hadn’t heard of him, just said "He’s good."  As in, "ok, I liked this guy, but he’s a Democrat, so he must be a huckster. But he’s a talented one."

Then, late last year, his updated view on Obama: "I think I could vote for him."  I could only turn around and smirk, once I’d picked my jaw up from the floor.