Bryan Fischer, Mike Huckabee and Geraldo Rivera on the Sandy Hook massacre: The pain of easy answers vs. the healing of simple solutions

Nothing is really easy to understand when the deaths of children are involved.

Yet somethings DO end up becoming very simple to understand.

Allow me to explain.

The issues facing our nation are indeed complex. All of them. "Easy" has no place when we tackle such issues. "Simple" might have a place in the discussion.

Simplicity breaks down the component parts of complex issues and handles each difficult part with focused attention. Like a math problem of many stages, simple steps combine to transform complex questions into answereable solutions.

Simplicity may in fact be a place to start in deconstructing the over-hanging complexities we have all been facing since Friday's massacre in Connecticut.

Easy is a reaction. A response. A thoughtless, jerking default setting.

We all know that the massacre of defenseless children is terribly wrong. The impact of the massacre of 20 children (and the adults who tried to save them) is enormous on all of us.

This central question has arisen over the weekend:

• Why did God allow this to happen?

It is a complex question.

Does it have an easy response or a simple solution?

Let's examine three spokesmen who quickly went on record before national audiences and let's compare their answers.

To begin with, we'll look at the first two men.

Bryan Fischer and Mike Huckabee have been singled out by national media as conservative individuals who've brought deeper pain to this issue by stating publicly that as a nation we may be reaping the effects of five decades of no prayer in school (as well as other social problems that have been embraced by our nation and allowed to become national norms).

The response in the blogoshere is bitter and visceral against both men. People across the internet blew up. Shrapnel went everywhere. Fischer and Huckabee were the recipients because they offered up easy answers. Too easy, it appears.

This allowed an outlet for deeply grieving people on the left to vent angrily. 

Often, the response by many people on any issue that overwhelms us is an "easy anger".

When it comes to children being abused or killed, the social/political intensity becomes nuclear.

The political tactic goes something like this:

• Both political sides speak out - wanting to easily capture the high ground on such a senseless act (none of which helps solve any underlying complexity.)
• Press headlines are captured - either intentionally or as a result of nature abhorring a vacuum - a heretofore unheard-of spokesman is quickly heralded.
• Spokesmen stake their claims and marshal their sides.

I know this routine, because I used it hundreds of times over the '90s when I advanced such incredibly insensitive, pithy and clever throw-away comments. It's incredibly convenient, yet is ultimately invalid.

Huckabee responded however a second time with an amazing clarification. Geraldo Rivera , our third man, was even more remarkable in his accuracy of analyzing what happened, as he supported Mike Huckabee's intent.

Simple reasons not easy responses.... it is never a question of "Where was God?".

Here's the simple reason why the murders happened on Friday:

Mr. Rivera put it quite simply: "This was a God-less act by an agent of the devil incarnate."

Mike Huckabee agreed.

So do I.

Mr. Fischer? Though I may be in error, his focus seems to be a continued answering of the question with which I began this post, as if "God's gentlemanly absence" (his wording) was an appropriate answer.

I don't see it that way.

I've not yet heard similar follow-up comments from him, as I've heard from Huckabee and Rivera, although I posted his full-length response above - on the link to his name - so that you can draw your own conclusions.

It's easier to attempt to answer the complex question of "Where was God?" with an easy answer.

And that simply doesn't work.

Den

 

 

Comments

[fortboise]

I don't have the need, or a position that calls for any sort of response, and so I can't take any special credit for being measured and judicious in what I've publicly said in response to the Newtown shooting. My sense is that the less said about intemperate and/or silly comments made under duress (whether externally or internally generated), the better. I could not possibly have less respect for Bryan Fischer than I do already. I had some positive sense of Mike Huckabee, but when I see him in the news, it almost always erodes that.

People who presume to explain the mind of G-d for actions taken or not taken can do nothing but embarrass themselves. G-d is not mocked.