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Andrew Tobias
Andrew Tobias

Money and Other Subjects

So Sad

June 13, 2016June 13, 2016

A friend turned 21 this month and flew from New York to Disney World to celebrate.

Finally old enough to drink, Pulse was on his short list for Saturday night.

He and his friends decided to do something else.

One of his college classmates did go to the bar that night and was murdered.

So senseless.  So sad.  So tragic.

The murderer was suicidal and, basically, insane — as are any willing followers of ISIS.  Either they literally think they’ll be rewarded with 72 virgins (not raisins or Virginians) and eternal paradise — which is nuts* — or they so hate their lives, their failure, their inability to find meaning or happiness, that they explode.

Or both.

Fortunately, it is a near infinitesimal percentage of people who do.  But when each can wreak so much carnage, and the carnage is intentional — unlike the 100 Americans routinely killed on highways each day — it consumes us.

As it should.

Trump blames the President for not using torture and killing the families of terrorists — and other unspecified means — to defeat ISIS.  The President won’t even use the words Trump and others want him to.

But if you feel that way about the words, or know others who do, I commend to you these four minutes. Fareed Zakaria makes clear how dangerous that path would be.  Watch, and let me know what you think.  Ask your friends to, as well.

But for now, what else is there to say?

So senseless.  So sad.  So tragic.


*Virgins, raisins, Virginians: all equally nuts.  The story of Scientology — taken literally?  Nuts.  The possibility that God literally parted the Red Sea for the Jews, all of a sudden, as in the movie?  Nuts.  That Jesus literally walked on water or that every Mormon gets his own planet? Nuts. As the brilliant unschooled Ugandan woman says near the end of The Book of Mormon — embracing her new faith yet rolling her eyes that these white missionaries, now disillusioned, could ever have believed the story literally — eeet eeeez a MEH-ta-phor!

 

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"Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man’s greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Age of Uncertainty

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