Jan 13 2011

Live Blog: Tucson Memorial Service

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  1. is this a memorial? or a rally?

    grief has a peculiar and distinct sound.

  2. Or can he just look waxy on demand?

  3. authentic to me. I left before Obama spoke. If we’re going to have a made for T.V. memorial service, let’s have one for every soldier killed or maimed for life, every person who died for lack of health care, all those foreign innocents killed in immoral wars etc. There’s enough pain and suffering for distraught families to have around the clock T.V. memorial services for the next hundred years.

    It’s nice to know that the presidency plays the role of master of ceremony for emotional public events and gives us the “moral lessons” involved. What great public figures we have.

    I met a gentleman today in the late afternoon whose son  just recently came back from Afghanistan without legs, amputated above the knees. I don’t know what is more tragic; the deep confusion and sorrow of the father or the description that his son gave him about how emotionally high he was during combat and the thrill it gave him.

     

  4. I’m the son of a minister and as such I’ve been going to church and memorial services for 46 some odd years and while I’ve seen the changes in the decorum of services over the years what with more contemporary music, a growing minister audience give and take like in the responsive reading of the psalms that used to be seen in some baptist churches, can I get an AMEN!!, and applause after solos or choir sung hymns but I’ve never seen clapping at a ‘memorial’ service.

    Yes this was to honor the responders and heroes but in that case it shouldn’t have been called a memorial service.  Then again I’m old and going gray so what do I know.

    As to Mr.Pres.  He is an awesome speaker IMHO.  His speech was well delivered and well written.  It did as advertised and honored the dead and injured, was non controversial (again IMHO), gave thanks to the proper folk and then Argh he lost me.  Civility, wrong place, wrong time.  This incident while saying much about gun control, the state of our mental health system and a host of other issues had nothing to do with civility.  The guy was and is a loon.  Maybe he was talked into a frenzy by the right, maybe Sarahs cross hairs got him all worked up but that remains to be seen and again IMHO has more to do with his stability and societies failures as noted above.  It’s back to the music made my kid kill himself argument.

    I’m not saying the topic of civility in discourse isn’t important just that it was the wrong place and time.  

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