Peggy Noonan is glad to see the families of the victims of last week's massacre so forgiving...but she will not extend that courtesy to those who wish to bringing up what needs to be done to prevent another one from happening.
Charleston deserves something, a bow. So too do the beautiful people who go to Wednesday night Bible study in America in 2015. They are the people who are saving America every day, completely unheralded, and we can hardly afford to lose them.
There’s only one thing Charleston doesn’t deserve. People apart from the trauma, far away, have already begun to bring their political agenda items to the tragedy and make sure they are debated. Because this is the right time for a political debate, right?
Here’s an idea: Why don’t you leave the grieving alone right now? Why don’t you not impose your agenda items on them? Why don’t you not force them to debate while they have tears in their throats?
Don’t politicize their pain. Don’t turn this into a debate on a flag or guns. Don’t use it to make your points and wave your finger from your high horse.
These people are doing it right without you.
They are loving each other and helping each other. Let them grieve in peace. And respect them as what they are, heroic.
So when is it the right time for this debate that America never seems to have? Next week? Next month? Next year? When do those of us who said time and time again that America's domestic terrorism problems and documented hate groups would become an issue get to have a word? Every time another massacre happens, those of us who want to have the debate are told "It's too soon!" and to shut up and go away, and the speed at which this silencing happens to the black community in America often breaks the sound barrier.
Why does Peggy Noonan get to decide when America has this debate? She does not speak for me, and she will never have earned that right from me. I sure as hell won't be silenced by her arrogant ignorance, and neither should anyone else.
Stuff it, Nooners. The President is ahead of you again.
I would be more open to a notorious racist's pleas for a respectful period of silence, in deference to the feelings of the recently bereaved, if she had shown in the past any inclination to say "time's up! Now we deal seriously with the problem of conservative monsters using my ideology to justify their use of guns to murder the people I like to see marginalized" when that period of respect was over.
ReplyDeleteInstead what we get is cynical ploy after cynical ploy to delay and defuse our righteous anger after each event in an appalling series of murders and assassinations. When will enough be enough?