You\u2019re waiting for the other shoe to drop.<\/p>\n\n
You know the shoe I\u2019m talking about \u2014 the religion shoe. When the Virginia Tech University story broke, you began clicking from website to website, channel to channel, seeking information and, then, something more. <\/p>\n\n
You\u2019ve seen photos of mourners in pews, offering comfort and seeking solace. You know that believers will pray and that journalists will keep aiming cameras at them, because, that?s what Bible Belt people do. People in southwest Virginia put scriptures on big road signs and build huge crosses next to Interstate highways. They pray. It\u2019s a good photo, but it\u2019s just prayer. Right?<\/p>\n\n
No, you\u2019re waiting for a real religion angle to surface, a crazy one linked to violence and power. After all, religion surfaces in so many bloody stories these days.<\/p>\n\n
Plus, you know there are politicos here inside the Beltway who are sitting, TV remotes in their hands, waiting to grade the candidates. Will Barack Obama get the tone right, with the right mixture of scripture and concern? Will Hillary Clinton look chilly? Will anyone in the GOP herd look both presidential and pastoral?<\/p>\n\n
You know the pope will say something and that \u2014 no matter what he says about the mysteries of life and death, good and evil \u2014 it will appear in news reports as a naive cry for peace and for an end to violence. <\/p>\n\n
Then again, journalists know that the Jerry Falwell\u2019s Liberty University is up I-81 from Blacksburg. So maybe he\u2019ll come to Virginia Tech and talk about jealousy, broken hearts and the sexual revolution. Or maybe Pat Robertson will say \u2014 something, anything. Then, on the other side, perhaps the atheist version of Robertson could call a press conference and say this tragedy is more evidence that life is random and without purpose. That would work.<\/p>\n\n
You\u2019re waiting to find out what video game the shooter played all hours of the day and night. Did he go to see the movie \u201c300\u201d one too many times? Was he driven by Satan or too many \u201cLeft Behind\u201d novels? People on both sides of the sacred vs. secular divide need to know.<\/p>\n\n
You\u2019re waiting to see if he killed more women than men. You want to know if the big massacre started in the classroom of an evangelical professor who once witnessed to the shooter and made him mad. You heard reporters say the shooter was Asian and you immediately thought: Asia? What part of Asia? What religion was he?<\/p>\n\n
You\u2019re waiting for something that points toward the source of this evil. Am I right? And if you remember the Columbine High School massacre, you may be thinking of that column that journalist Peggy Noonan \u2014 a traditional Catholic \u2014 wrote about the \u201cculture of death\u201d hours after that hellish day.<\/p>\n\n
She wrote: \u201cYour child is an intelligent little fish. He swims in deep water. Waves of sound and sight, of thought and fact, come invisibly through that water, like radar; they go through him again and again, from this direction and that. The sound from the television is a wave, and the sound from the radio. \u2026 The waves contain words like this, which I\u2019ll limit to only one source, the news:<\/p>\n\n
\u201c\u2026 took the stand to say the killer was smiling the day the show aired \u2026 said the procedure is, in fact, legal infanticide \u2026 is thought to be connected to earlier sexual activity among teens \u2026 court battle over who owns the frozen sperm \u2026 contains songs that call for dominating and even imprisoning women \u2026 died of lethal injection \u2026 had threatened to kill her children. \u2026 had asked Kevorkian for help in killing himself \u2026 protested the game, which they said has gone beyond violence to sadism \u2026 showed no remorse \u2026 which is about a wager over whether he could sleep with another student \u2026 which is about her attempts to balance three lovers and a watchful fiance\u2026 <\/p>\n\n
\u201cThis is the ocean in which our children swim. This is the sound of our culture. It comes from all parts of our culture and reaches all parts of our culture, and all the people in it, which is everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
You\u2019re waiting for the other shoe to drop. You want to know the eternal \u201cwhy\u201d in \u201cwho, what, when, where, why and how.\u201d <\/p>\n\n
I know that I do.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You\u2019re waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know the shoe I\u2019m talking about \u2014 the religion shoe. When the Virginia Tech University story broke, you began clicking from website to website, channel to channel, seeking information and, then, something more. You\u2019ve seen photos of mourners in pews, offering comfort and seeking solace. You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":610,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[278,343,414,608,859],"class_list":["post-1434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-culture-of-death","tag-evil","tag-guns","tag-noonan","tag-theodicy"],"yoast_head":"\n