Hugging in America

I really hate pictures of people hugging.

They always trot out a hugging picture after some crazy shoots people, or after a natural disaster or whenever sad things happen. The editors must have a drawer full of hugging shots.

It reminds me of that comment in the 5th season of The Wire, where the newspaper editor is looking at the photos from the scene of a Baltimore fire, shaking his head. The photographer always sends in a photo of a singed teddy bear found in the wreckage of the fire.  The editor says, "He must have a trunk full of burnt teddy bears, and he just plucks one out, snaps a shot, sends it in and goes off to the bar."

Or we have some TV bimbo news reporter telling us, "And here's a heart rending story...a real heart breaker.
Okay, we get it. This is supposed to make us make a sad face and say, "Awww."

I mean, why bother?

So today, on the front page of the NY Times , we have people from Aurora, Colorado hugging.

Fact is, those kids killed in Aurora are the price Americans are willing to pay for their guns. 

When and if, the voters in this country decide they are sick of the sporadic, random shootings by crazies, they can do what voters in Japan have done, and take guns out of the equation. 

Of course, then the crazies can turn to bombs or Saran gas or some other ugly thing. Timothy McVeigh used a fertilizer bomb. 

Ronald Reagan famously said, "There will always be poor." And in doing so, the President washed away a lot of liberal guilt about having money, when others have so little. He was saying, "It's not your fault you are rich and others are poor. It's their own fault they are poor. Or maybe it's someone's fault, but not yours. So enjoy."

Now we can say, "There will always be crazies killing innocents. Guns are not the problem. It's the crazies." 

End of guilt. Nothing we can do.

So just run the hugging photo. Take it from a stock of say, a dozen hugging people, young people hugging, old people hugging young people, old people hugging old people, everyone making it better by kissing the boo boo and hugging.

I don't know. Hugging does not pass my smell test. It smells phony to me.

But, that's just me. 

I'm just saying.