Election choice more crucial with each attack
There’s never a right time for evil to flourish, but this latest episode of wanton savagery in Munich could not have come at a more propitious time as Republicans head to their dugout and Democrats prepare to take the field in this two-week display of buffoonery we call our national conventions.
If the world, by force of habit, is once again looking to America as an iron fist in a velvet glove, wielding a big stick, in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, how dismayed it must be to see us looking for our next commander in chief in what amounts to a threering circus.
Campaign speeches are getting to be like fingernails on a blackboard.
People doing nothing more adventuresome than shopping had to run for cover in a Munich mall, and for what?
They died because some fool thought sacrificing their lives was a small price to pay to soothe and validate whatever sickness festered within him.
This world is in the merciless grip of a madness that’s metastasizing before our eyes, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep score, isn’t it?
God knows each victim at least deserves to be mourned and remembered, but they’re piling up so fast it’s simply impossible for us to adequately pause and reflect.
We don’t know these slaughtered people on our TV screens.
Or do we? They and their loved ones may look different to us, dress different from us, but when we see them in the cruel clutches of unspeakable grief, their blood and tears look an awful lot like our own, don’t they?
The GOP wants to “lock up” Hillary?
The Democrats think the Republicans are as dangerous as Ebola?
It sounds so cheap this morning, so shamefully selfindulgent.
If we’re the country the rest of the world counts on when madmen run amok, how discouraging it must be for those foreign onlookers to see our would-be leaders slinging mud at one another, as if being president was no bigger deal than being king or queen of the prom.
That’s infuriating. That’s indecent.
The world deserves better and so do we.
Cleveland? Philadelphia? Don’t look for reality there.
Try the Bataclan Concert Hall, or an airport in Istanbul, or a popular boulevard in Nice.
Try a nightclub in Orlando, or a municipal office in San Bernardino. Picture assassinated cops.
No, we’re not looking for entertainment from our candidates.
We’re looking for the right person to assume the helm in a very troubled America, and we cannot afford to get it wrong.