LATimes: Editorial: Too terrible for words:

IN THE BIBLICAL Book of Job, the anguished hero is visited by three friends who attempt to comfort him by drawing airy and sententious lessons from his agonies. Of course, they end up adding to his troubles; Job endures not only the real pains of grief and sickness but the indignity of having his suffering milked for rhetorical effect.

If only it were true that Monday’s mass murder on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University was the kind of tragedy that moves us to quiet reflection. In fact, the shootings that killed more than 30 people and wounded nearly 30 others occasioned a blizzard of hasty conclusions, instant position-taking and the rehashing of old arguments. For the sake of the dead, for the sake of the living, and even for the sake of honoring this grim milestone — the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history — we should remember that there are times when silence is the best response.

Events like these are almost impossible to react to sanely. A group of people you don’t know have been killed in a senseless crime. Too young to have established much of a past, they’ve been robbed of present and future; the weight of the offense, the rotten meaninglessness of it, makes it awkward not to have something to say.

So the ghastly death toll — perhaps inflicted by one man with a pair of semiautomatic handguns — becomes an obvious argument for enhanced gun control. Or, conversely, for the right to bear arms because Virginia Tech is a “gun-free zone,” and the Virginia Legislature last year killed a bill that would have allowed students to carry guns on campus.

For those who support universities’ in loco parentis functions, the school’s apparently unconscionable delay in alerting the student body to the presence of a gunman on campus is at the heart of the tragedy. Then there’s the male-violence angle, supported by a shooter’s apparent rage at an ex-girlfriend. Most pernicious of all, perhaps, is the request to put the matter “into perspective.”

“I have heard many such things,” Job says. “Miserable comforters are ye all.” No newspaper is in a position to criticize anybody for capitalizing on tragedy or taking convenient positions. There will be time for both in the days to come. But now is a time to respect, quietly, the tears and the pain of this terrible event.

Today America honors a great man who fewer and fewer wish to see eye to eye: Martin Luther King, Jr., Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution:

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must find an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are still a lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy said on one occasion, “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.” The world must hear this. I pray to God that America will hear this before it is too late, because today we’re fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are spending five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time we kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend only fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a good skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as an arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home fighting for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even put our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men to fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that can’t hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the line and see that something must be done—and something must be done quickly. We have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of the United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so the only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.

This is where we are. “Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind,” and the best way to start is to put an end to war in Vietnam, because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of confronting China which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

It was a terrific day for democracy wasn’t it? When I look out and about on the web and in the media however, I find some real nasty spinning, everyone pointing fingers and claiming it was some slice of the populace that made a difference. Counting upon who you read it’s the progressives, the liberals, the middle class, the independents, the disgruntled Republicans who didn’t vote, the evangelicals who went back to the Democratic party, even Lou Dobbs Democrats.

I think a few things are clear:

1. The Neo-Cons are ummm… toast. Rummy resigning yesterday and Dubya’s ever growing ties with earlier Republican administration officials (in particular his father’s – an old fashioned conservative if there ever was one) are sure signs that Neo-Con ideology is being ejected from this Administration, just as its proponents distance themselves from it. Can the damage they’ve wrought be repaired anytime soon?

2. Karl Rove isn’t the genius everyone makes him out to be. Wedge issues suddenly were being thrown as election day approached, and it wasn’t enough to turn the tide of public sentiment. This time.

3. If the margin is wide enough – the vote can’t be stolen.

4. With enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. The web empowered thousands of people to become watchdogs, that had to have some kind of effect. That isn’t to say that folks shouldn’t take the eye off the ball when it comes to voting machines and the voting infrastructure. There were troubling signs across election day.

5. The web is now established as an environment you MUST campaign in. It has empowered both politicians to get their message to audiences before not reached, routing around news media filters (via YouTube and other participatory media), and it has empowered citizens to organize, fundraise, and be heard as never before (via the same).

6. TV commercials got nuts this year, didn’t they? I was waiting for a candidate to accuse their opponent of eating children. When the analysis comes in, I bet there will be a realization it was money spent that had little to no effect.

7. A diverse coalition of people came together for a moment to say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH – and the American people spoke.

All and all, it was a sunny day in Philadelphia.