Shameless

Common decency is not a great virtue, but is good to have around in community.

When someone died, I was taught to speak as kindly as possible. We are not talking about covering up for evil, but showing some charity toward another human being who faces judgement beyond human control. My grandparents called this common decency.

Let the family mourn and take care of necessary business as quietly as possible.

In the same way, a national tragedy is the wrong time to score political points. Common decency suggests letting a community mourn, helping if we can, and leaving our agenda out of it. A sure sign of a dangerously dysfunctional leader is when he must rush to associate his cause with a tragedy.

When Titanic sank, a day of reckoning should have come for the White Star Line and for the government regulators who refused to update rules for ships. Hearings did come and the dead captain came in for criticism and intense scrutiny, but not the next day. He was dead like the brave man he was and it was worth pausing to mourn first. Sadly, common decency is in short supply today.

The causes of the school shooting in Oregon are bound to be complicated. The desire to blame some group immediately is indecent. Politicians using victims not yet buried to pitch legislation they already supported is ghoulish. The desire to do something is natural, but must begin by acknowledging right now there is little I can do. Perhaps the best thing to be done is to avert our eyes for a week and let a community mourn without having to sate our morbid curiosity. We can pray, reflect, and donate funds for the victims. Nobody needs us to rush to judgment or grandstand.

The Oregon shooting is horrible. We don’t know enough to draw any greater conclusion yet. This is not about politics, scoring philosophic points, or pontificating on our preferred solutions to problems like this. Mental health problems? Terrorism? Nihilism? We should mourn before pretending we know the causes.

There is time to get to solutions after we know the facts, but the arrogance that proclaims “we already know” when we scarcely know the motivation of the  killer is hard to stomach. Leave the politics and the arguments for next week. This is common decency now all too uncommon.