Crises Bring Out the Stupidity in People

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One of the comforting things in the tragedy of the Las Vegas mass murder was watching the best in people. That one thing about crises: be they natural (the hurricanes) or man-made (this, 9/11, all the others that are sadly becoming too numerous to mention), we see the love for fellow human that the dividers in the country would like us to think doesn't exist any longer. Unfortunately, they also bring out the stupidity in people. Those aforementioned people who want this country divided (and yes, I truly believe there is a deliberate, concerted effort to split this country apart [the Bible says, "A house divided against itself cannot stand;" or, as Abraham Lincoln paraphrased it, "United we stand, divided we fall"]) slithered out of the woodwork while the gunshots were still ricocheting. There are people, for instance, who believe that every mass shooting is fake. They say that Sandy Hook was staged because there was no footage, that the Pulse Nightclub was "staged" (citing a couple of people who claimed they were offered money to secure a perimeter around the area the night of the shooting), and basically they're all hoaxes because scared people who've just been traumatized and never before a news camera and a microphone before are "poor actors." When I was doing a search for news coverage on You Tube yesterday I saw, at 10 AM eastern time (which is less than eight hours after the massacre), a glob of videos "proving" that the shooting was staged and a hoax. "No video of people shot," they claimed (I wonder if they think that Robin Williams isn't really dead because there's "no video" of his lifeless body ) -- despite ample video of people shot. "The guns sound different," they say (different guns make different noises: I shot an M-14 and a .45 in boot camp, and they didn't sound anything alike). Stupidity, ad nauseum. Then there was the mercifully-now-unemployed executive at CBS News, who said that she had no sympathy for the 59 dead and 500-plus wounded. "I'm actually not even sympathetic (because) country music fans often are Republican gun toters," she wrote in a reply to a Facebook discussion about the shootings. (After she was fired she issued a statement claiming that her words don't reflect her actual beliefs...I don't want to know what her "actual" beliefs are if those were "fake beliefs"!!) Finally, although I haven't heard anything about it yet, I'll wager right now that, by the end of the week, there will be numerous stories of scam artists either trying to collect some of the $2.6 million raised by kindhearted and brokenhearted people at a Go Fund Me page for the victims, or scamming people by claiming they are "raising money for the victims." Sadly, we've seen this too often, too: the scammers beat the Salvation Army to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and there were stories of people posing as FEMA and ICE agents in the midst of Hurricane Irma in Florida. Crises will bring out the best in us. They also brings out the stupidity in many.