Sometimes my reaction to awful news gets the better of me. In my head, I don't want justice. I want the terror and the pain and the loss inflicted on these moviegoers in Colorado to be visited on their perpetrator. And if I get particularly angry about it, I'll imagine his family made to watch, made to think about it, made to suffer, because I don't want his pain to end. I want it magnified, turned to salt that is plowed into the earth where he grew up, topped by a basalt spike with the his name carved into it to endure for decades.
Good morning! So: there's good reason I don't consider myself a Christian. Part of it has to do with what I think is the outmoded expression of faith I see in organized religion, specifically the Catholic Church. Part of it has to do with many churches that take faith for granted and use it for a political base.
And part of it -- the part that's relevant here -- is I don't feel so very ready, in my weakest moments, to forgive or forget. Or, for that matter, to give any better than I get.
Then, fortunately for me, I snap out of it. I pull back, I tune in to look for voices of reason, empathy, outrage, grief to help me sort it through. I look for the voices in my community that will broaden my perspective and help me make sense of what we all feel when one person drives himself towards hell, determined to send as many others before him as he can. I take a breath, take another one, work out the futility of my own emotions to yet another pointless act I can do nothing about. My knee-jerk desire for some outlandish reprisal, I know, is really something about me. And I know, in that sense, that what my psyche puts itself through is an even more futile gesture. Fortunately, it's only me that has to deal with what my mind goes through before I come back to light.
So, Louie, on what you said out loud. One: I'll call you Mr. Gohmert when you come back to behaving like an adult man. Two: use your inside voice, please. Three, you just made a call for armed resistance to a lone gunman no one saw coming. Inside a movie theater. Can you tell me what you truly believe is the more pointed attack on Judeo-Christian beliefs?
This is an astonishingly weak moment, made public for what I can only imagine is a brief opportunity at political grandstanding. I hope you come to your senses soon.
Of course, I too am only so strong, and before I breathe all the way through your toxic addition to the national conversation, I have this to say. I think it's your horribly repressed homosexuality, sir. Get a grip on it. Get that blowjob from that dude in that Greyhound station that you're still thinking about, somehow, some way, and just. get. over it. The short-term outcomes won't be too pretty, I'm sure, but they'll be yours to own. Much better than spraying it all over the rest of us like you did today.
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