Legal Commentary

Life Lived Humbly, In The Round

By Kevin Funnell

"Most men seem to live in a space of two dimensions," complained Theodore Roosevelt, who tended to live his life "in the round."

The hash that the main stream and "heterodox" media, and our political class, have made of "the lessons of Tuscon" give proof to his complaint. The greatest "blood libel" that has been uttered has nothing to do with anything Sarah Palin or Tea Partiers might or might not have uttered and who was or was not influenced by the same, and everything to do with the fact that every pundit making an assertion as to the lessons we should learn from this seemingly senseless act of horrific violence claims that his or her assertion is "the truth."

The truth? You can't HANDLE the truth!

Here's what I think may be approaching the truth, and I don't assert it as a fact or even as something as profound. It's merely something that, to me, sheds a little light in the darkness. Maybe that light is equivalent to that of a firefly flickering in the bowels of a deep, dark woods, and if you find it so, move along, because there's nothing to see here.

We're incapable of making sense of such senseless acts of violence, and it's hubris to claim otherwise. While we always must do the best we can to "police up the area" and take whatever actions we think -- with the application of our limited reason and with a conscious recognition that we are all flawed human beings who will never get it absolutely right -- we deem appropriate to preserve public order and minimize the risks, the ultimate "reason" that six people died and others were seriously wounded in a Safeway parking lot by a man who thinks that government is controlling our grammar and therefore a score or more of other human beings must die by his righteous hand, is beyond our ken. Not if you're a commentator on MSNBC, Fox News, or HBO, of course, but for most of the rest of us, most assuredly.

Writing of the death of his beloved wife from cancer, in his most personally anguished book ("A Grief Observed"), C.S. Lewis uttered a passage that's stayed with me through many a horror, public and personal.

The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness...But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't.

Either way, we're for it.

Yes, either way, we're for it. You "take your choice" about what to believe and in that choice lies all the difference in the world about how you respond to your inability to control the world around you and the bad things that happen to you. Some respond with a humility fit for a life lived in the round, others with the arrogance that a political or legal construct will assure us all that "it will never happen again."

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on January 18, 2011 (boomark / email).