Also, is that Sea of Shoes Jane above?

But moving on, my feelings about the Sandy Hook shootings is that a horrible event has triggered an orgy of faux sentimentality and manufactured responses shaped by the media. Even the poor parents have been sucked into making their children celebrities of a sort. The parents are in shock and don’t even know what the fuck is going on.

If the nation and/or world has turned its numbed hearts to Sandy Hook in order to revel in its own ability to feel something, I don’t have to buy into it and I don’t.

The world will get tired of this topic just as it got tired of Haiti, and forgive me if this sounds too cynical.

The target of my disgust in this post was the Super Bowl thing. That was pure Show Biz.

Believe me, I’m not rolling my eyes at your questions, I too have questions about humanity. Too many to list.

My best friend lives in the US, and she was entirely affected by the Sandy Hook shooting without personally knowing anyone involved. First, it confused me as to why she was so obsessed for weeks with this particular incident, but then I tried to brush my own reactions to it aside and listen to her, and then it became clear that the seed of her mourning was because her own daughter is 6 years old, and the issue of true random [not the hipster usage of the term] was in play: that sense of fear and relief and devastation of possibility, and guilt that it wasn’t her child, but that another version of her [as one of the Sandy Hook mothers],was going through this loss, and it was too horrible to contemplate…
and this attempt at empathy – even though it has its flaws – is what I think the whole concept of a shared humanity is about.

We can’t grieve for everyone, but we tend to grieve for those we can feasible imagine could be us in another time or place.

I do appreciate the sense of tackiness that you are railing against – I always “hide” the facebook posts of saccarin “if you have lost someone to this [insert disease here, usually cancer” please share on your wall” in the same way I roll my eyes at multicolored ribbons other than red [because AIDS has affected my circle of friends] or despair at the hypocrisy of charities that are really big business, or secretly sneer at posters about two sets of footprints – but can we really afford to be so cynical at public outpourings of grief that differ from our own elegant displays? And what qualifies us as judges of what constitutes authentic suffering or reactions to public or personal trauma?
At what expense do we turn our hearts to stone?
Are we compelled to do this in order to immunise ourselves against the sheer volume of grief in the world?
So many rhetorical questions that you too can roll your eyes at.

I’ve scattered stuff throughout the latitudes and longitudes M’Lady, hoping to catch Andra’s attention – thankfully needlessly as it turns out – but do please, in the future, limit my exposures to nice girls.

I worries too much over nice girls, Nice Sister Wolf. & loves ’em as it turns out.

JK – I don’t have her phone number either – you can probably find her on facebook. She will appreciate your concern, I am sure. xo