Reply #61: I love Mr. Ellison, but he ain't COMPLETELY right.

[tomreedtoon]

His claim that Rush Limbaugh is just like the kids who kill their classmates in school, for instance, is incorrect.

This will probably get me a lot of hate responses, a la Bill Maher, but here it is. Limbaugh doesn't have any courage. The Columbine killers did.

They were kids who saw a hopeless life ahead of them. Nobody, not their high-falutin' teachers or student counselors, not their peers, and apparently not their parents, gave a damn about them. They could have simply suicided and everyone would have shrugged and gone on with life. Instead, they decided to make a statement. The only one they could make, given the kind of people they were.

You may not like their act. But at least they went down trying to fight their enemies, at considerable risk. Limbaugh, on the other hand, wouldn't have had the guts.

To quote Ellison, "What soulless drives motivate these selfish, self-serving, bestial creatures?" Answer: Desperation. Hopelessness. Despair. Many people have no rational way out. Limbaugh has wealth and connections and self-delusions to keep the dark at bay. Ellison, a respected and talented man, has a few ways out. Ordinary people like you and me have fewer ways out, and those are increasingly closed off. But there are many people, and we will probably join them soon, for whom life is a long string of zeros and impassible walls, with the rich and the powerful either laughing at us or ignoring us.

Oh, and there's this: the person who made the most public study of Columbine, Michael Moore, didn't give a damn about the kids either. He used them to promote his message of gun control. All well and good, but he never gave more than a moment thinking about what horrible forces in society, the cruel nature of human beings that most human beings overlook, that turned them into killers. Ditto for Gus Van Sant and his Columbine ripoff film "Elephant."