What Does the Colorado No-Joker Have in Common with a Suicide Bomber?
    Our hearts are heavy with the brutal senselessness and tragic consequences of the Colorado No-Joker’s fifteen minutes of infamy. Our mass media, alas, will give him and his mindset the mass attention for which he yearned for another four or five weeks until the next mass phenomenon catches their ADD eye. Martyrdom, for the martyr, is fleeting.
   Meanwhile, lower down on the page, within days of the Colorado tragedy, over a hundred people were killed and three hundred wounded in Iraq on Monday, the worst single day of casualties in over two years. Both car bombs and suicide bombers were used for the senseless, Godless (Allah-less) violence. The Iraqi statistic will fade much quicker from our collective western eye than will the No-Joker’s numbers.
   Still, the two tragedies have much in common. First, are the lives of the victims’ relatives— the mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children— irrevocably wrenched, not just for days, but for years, months, decades, by the ignorant mindset of those behind the violence. The mindset of the suicide bombers in Iraq and the No-Joker in Colorado are not dissimilar— each sacrificing their own lives and the lives of those around them because of their silly faith in a chimera, be that chimera the battle between Batman and the Joker or the battle between Shia and Sunni.
    The martyr and military mindset are the same. The violent uselessness of such a mindset becomes ever-more apparent.
   May you rest in peace, you children sacrificed, that we may learn, again, this ancient, fundamental lesson: The Colorado gunman, and the Iraqi martyrs, killed their own brothers and sisters, our brothers and sisters. We renew our devotion to dissolving such mindlessness, here in our family.