When my father, former Senator Bob Bennett, passed away just over a month ago, our family was inundated with kind messages of love and support. Glowing tributes appeared in the media, and my siblings and I read every one we could find.\u00a0We also, against our better judgment, read the public comments people made online.<\/p>\n
For the most part, the comments were just as kind as the articles, but there were some glaring, obnoxious exceptions. One guy went on every site he could find to remind people of\u00a0the eyesore that was the abandoned\u00a0Bennett Glass and Paint Warehouse that used to be on the corner of 21st South and 300 West,\u00a0a building my father didn’t own and had nothing to do with. Another thought that excoriating my father as a RINO\u00a0was appropriate in light of his passing, as if a parting partisan shot was going to make a difference. One person just typed two words: “Ding, dong…” As in, I assume, “Ding, dong, the witch is dead.” Every nasty barb made my blood boil, and even if such messages were preceded by a dozen lovely sentiments, the nasty ones overshadowed everything else.<\/p>\n
Nastiness tends to do that. Just a tiny bit\u00a0of it can color your entire perception, like a single drop of red food coloring into an otherwise clear glass of water. The transparent\u00a0water\u00a0outweighs the red, but the red distorts and changes everything else, far in excess to its actual percentage of the overall liquid.<\/p>\n
Remembering this is helpful as I am forced to absorb the news of the horrific massacre in Orlando, the worst mass shooting in American history. As the response to this latest atrocity breaks down predictably along partisan and ideological lines, I find myself uninterested in taking sides, because I think the sides are increasingly defined by a small amount of negativity that is perceived to be much broader than it really is. And I think we are all diminished when we assume\u00a0that\u00a0a single drop of bile is actually an ocean, and that vast swaths of our fellow human beings are as odious as the monster who perpetrated these crimes.<\/p>\n
How many people, in the wake of these murders, have stated that most Republicans are indifferent to gun violence? They aren’t. With a handful of odious exceptions, they’re as torn up about this as everyone else. How many people, in the wake of these murders, think that Muslims applauded this slaughter? They didn’t.\u00a0With a handful of odious exceptions, they’re as horrified\u00a0by\u00a0this as everyone else. \u00a0How many people, in the wake of these murders, believe\u00a0religionists, or at least those who teach\u00a0that\u00a0sex outside of heterosexual marriage is sinful, would like\u00a0to see gay people\u00a0gunned down in cold blood?\u00a0They wouldn’t. With a handful of odious exceptions, they’re as heartbroken\u00a0by\u00a0this as everyone else.<\/p>\n
Yet in the wake of every publicly\u00a0evil act, we only hear from the exceptions and not the rules. We get posts about the one repugnant\u00a0pastor who prayed for gays to die, or the\u00a0one\u00a0Muslim extremist dreaming of 72 virgins, or the one hillbilly\u00a0who thinks he has a constitutional right to own an ICBM, or the one Donald Trump who thinks\u00a0keeping all Muslims from immigrating to America\u00a0would have prevented a terrorist attack perpetuated by an American citizen\u00a0who has\u00a0been here his whole life.\u00a0(Sorry. Cheap shot.)<\/p>\n
The point is that we’re shown the One, and then we’re told the One represents the Many. And maybe, as in the case of the Trump-ites, they do represent the Many. But I have to think that, in most cases, they do not. And certainly it would improve\u00a0our interactions with each other, as we each try to come to terms with senseless violence and find ways to prevent\u00a0it, if we were to speak to each other one on one, and not make the lazy assumption that those who disagree with us are equivalent to the very worst representatives of any\u00a0Many that we don’t like.<\/p>\n
I think that would actually help.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whenmy father, former Senator Bob Bennett, passed away just over a month ago, our family was inundated with kind messages of love and support. Glowing tributes appeared in the media, and my siblings and I read every one we could find.\u00a0We also, against our better judgment, read the public comments people made online.For the ... Read more<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3957"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3957\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3963,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3957\/revisions\/3963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stallioncornell.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}