When tragedy hits close to home
It never ceases to amaze me at how quickly people use a tragedy to begin to push an agenda. I still have vivid memories of a horrific “open letter” written to Pfc. Tucker’s parents by an anti-war zealot who thought that he would use the horror that this family faced to push his own public agenda. The columnist said in his note that he was addressing the family publicly since they had refused to talk with him personally. Excuse me, but since when does a grieving family owe the media anything? Since when can a family not have a moment of grief and privacy when facing tragedy such as the Tucker and Menchaca families faced?
I bring this story up because the same thing is happening with the Virginia Tech shootings. The tragedy that hit our Country yesterday goes beyond the tragic and into the catastrophic. The lives that are forever devastated are far reaching. My husband personally knows one of the Engineering students who was killed. She was a promising Engineer with a natural aptitude for science. Who knows the brilliance that was lost yesterday. Yet, instead of giving the dead a moment of silence, and giving the living a moment to grieve, the media has once again shown its opportunistic and tragedy laden parasitic relationship to horrific news and pushing an agenda.
We are like ghouls when it comes to the media. We feed off of the dead and all of the sick and twisted “entertainment” we can derive from it, or for all of the advantage we can get using human tragedy as a mere soap box for an agenda. Dead tarts are used for entertainment purposes, dead soldiers are used as a prop for speaking out against the war, and now human carnage at a college campus is being used to spur on a debate about gun control.
My own personal agenda in writing this is to implore the public to leave the grieving families in peace and let them grieve and process this horrible loss.
Please read (Michelle Malkin’s site):
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