About recent events in Norway : For those who somehow have not heard, a crazed gunman killed something like eighty people in a murderous rampage in Norway recently. Some of them, reportedly, were children.

And while the tragedy itself is horrifying and frightening enough, what I find truly depressing is the reaction.

For one thing, the media, when the reports first started coming out of something extremely terrible going down in Norway, immediately and with absolutely nothing but their own stupidity and prejudice to go on, pinned it on Muslim extremists. Must be them dark skinned foreigners, still mad about that Mohammed cartoon, they all said, from the New York Times to the Daily News, and then nodded their pointed heads while trying out their very best Serious Faces on one another.

Well, it wasn’t Muslim anything, it was a Christian anti-immigration anti-Muslim bigot of the kind currently making otherwise sane nations pass laws against wearing veils or building minarets all throughout Europe.

So the world media, already pretty goddamned low in my books for their general lack of interest in actual news and speaking truth to power, preferring instead to hound innocent celebrities and make up fake scandals and treat them like real news, has dropped even further in my opinion. They all should be deeply ashamed of how downright eager they were to pin this whole thing on Muslims and how long it took them to admit they had been very, very wrong and that it was, in fact, a right-wing Christin extremist who had perpetrated this heinous crime.

That fact just does not fit the right-wing narrative of persecution and threat (the same narrative that convinces nutcases like the shooter that the ends justify the means) and the media has a million omelet’s worth of egg on their face for this shameful reaction.

Of course, who is going to hold them accountable for it? The media themselves? Hardly.

And of course, a lot of people’s first reaction to news of a tragedy like this is not “oh, what a horrible incident, those poor people” but “See, this proves that everything I have been saying is true, so there!”.

That is the main reason, I think, that I tend to never respond to these things immediately. I don’t want to get pulled into trying to make some kind of political point off of the deaths of eighty people while people are still reeling from the impact.

That’s just plain inappropriate.

I understand why people do it. Often, our politics are top in our minds when we watch the news, and when we think about the world outside our little corrals, and so our first thoughts will often be expressed through that filter.

But still, it saddens me.

In some ways, it saddens me more than the incident itself. The incident, while horrible, is just the act of a lone lunatic with a head full of the worst possible ideas and that little piece missing in his mind that keeps most of us from actually doing the crazy things we think about doing on a day to day basis.

As human beings, we naturally attempt to assign meaning to large and terrible events like this in order to convince ourselves that the world makes some sort of sense and that terrible things like this don’t happen completely at random.

But they do happen at random, or at least, from so many factors that it might as well be random. . That’s the thing we human beings cannot handle : bad things happening to innocent people for absolutely no reason. That’s why religion always grows in times of tragedy. People need explanations for why these terrible things have happened or are happening. They would even prefer to believe that the world is going straight to Hell and there’s nothing anyone can do about it than accept that sometimes, terrible things happen for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Meaningless pain is humanity’s worst fear, in some ways.

So we look for something or someone to blame. If we can fix the blame, we can fix the problem, and make sure the bad things don’t happen again.

And often, this results in a call for politicians to Do Something, even if there is nothing reasonable that could be done. And so poorly thought out laws are passed in reaction to a fleeting moment and then have to be obeyed for the rest of time.

Well, there I go, making some of my own political points on the back of this tragedy.

Guess I am no better than anyone else in that regard.