Not Yet a Time for "Healing"
Dennis Prager has it absolutely right -- it is not yet time for "healing" (with all the psychotherapeutic overtones that the term conveys).
What's more, as Prager points out:
And why is it always referred to as a "tragedy"? Virginia Tech wasn't hit by a cyclone. That would be a tragedy. This was evil. Call it that.
We have embraced emotion-numbing, righteous-rage-denying, morally neutered, therapeutic language. It is as much a part of our national crisis as are the acts of evil we refuse to identify as such.
I made the same point shortly after 9/11 when the attack was being called a "tragedy." Sometimes, it's hard not to conclude that the people who want to obfuscate and designate everything a "tragedy" are those who are profoundly uncomfortable with the concepts of good and evil. Designating events like today's murders a "tragedy" is just another way of eliminating the moral element (and the element of choice and any element of "judging") from what is indubitably an evil act.
What's more, as Prager points out:
And why is it always referred to as a "tragedy"? Virginia Tech wasn't hit by a cyclone. That would be a tragedy. This was evil. Call it that.
We have embraced emotion-numbing, righteous-rage-denying, morally neutered, therapeutic language. It is as much a part of our national crisis as are the acts of evil we refuse to identify as such.
I made the same point shortly after 9/11 when the attack was being called a "tragedy." Sometimes, it's hard not to conclude that the people who want to obfuscate and designate everything a "tragedy" are those who are profoundly uncomfortable with the concepts of good and evil. Designating events like today's murders a "tragedy" is just another way of eliminating the moral element (and the element of choice and any element of "judging") from what is indubitably an evil act.
posted by LadybugUSA at 10:23 PM
1 Comments:
Actually, I think you and Prager have it exactly backward. As the Greeks understood it, tragedy is an outgrowth of human weakness. Not just Cho's evil madness, but the failure of the people responsible for him and who cared for him to understand it.
A natural disaster isn't a tragedy. It's a horror, but it isn't something that arises from human decisions.
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