One for Christina Taylor Green

The first time I ever "blogged" was years before they called it blogging. I did so in response to a local tragedy, a car accident that took the lives of three local girls. The next time was my reaction to the Columbine shootings, and I'm sad to see that neither site is up any longer. Thanks, AOL. I've also, as you hopefully have noticed, have written numerous times about September 11. So it makes perfect sense for the horrible events in Tucson to bring me back. Not that I think it's a good thing, this just helps me vent when crazy, horrible shit happens.

Saturday afternoon I was dosing off on the couch, not so much because I was even that tired, it's just my natural reaction to "iCarly" or whichever awful show the Kyd had me watching. Then my bride came out of our room, looking very worried. She explained what had been reported up till then, that a Congresswoman in Tucson had been shot, and there were other victims. Being that my parents live in Tucson, she had tried calling them, but there was no answer. So she began to worry. Not because she thought the odds of them being around a shooting in Tucson were all that high, but at first glance, that shopping center looked exactly like the one around the corner from my parents. And my parents are Democrats, and if they were just around the corner from a chance to meet their Representative, they would have been there.

A short time later we got them on the phone, so that was a relief. That's when we found out that my mom had volunteered this past year in Congresswoman Giffords' office. Shit got even more real then. From there, it just seemed to get more and more personal. As I'm sure most of us found different bits of news easy to relate to, I felt like it was just one thing after another. When it broke that one of the victims was a sweet, precocious, inquisitive nine year old, well, that rattled my cage. Oh, and she was born on 9/11. And, this sounds completely trivial, I'm sure, but her Grandfather was a former Major League Baseball manager. And he just happened to be a former manager of the Mets.

Then last night I found myself glued to the TV watching President Obama give a truly inspirational speech at a memorial service in Tucson. I'm not here to argue politics, this time, but while I like a lot of the things Obama has done, and have been less than pleased with others. He reminded us all why he won the election: he's a leader. Not only did he say the right things, you could tell he meant them. It was absolutely perfect. His old consigliore, Rahm Emanuel, has taken flack for saying, "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste." If you take that as, exploit the hell out of it for political gain, I can see it being offensive. For me, it sounds like something I'd say to the Kyd. A crisis, or a tragedy is a great opportunity to learn something. To make the right choices, and come out the other side a better person.

I believe that's what Christina Taylor Green would think too, and she deserves our good example.