Welcome to DU, NCjack!

Glad you're here! I was just thinking that - "gee, maybe I'd want to write 'except for governor pence and all his prejudiced friends' at the bottom of that sign." But you beat me to it!

Yeah, no kidding.

Sounds like a good time to spread this one around:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10026418496

Peace, safe passage, and high flight to you, ms.smiler.

Yes, certainly.

You're totally correct. But at least we have SOME explanation in his case. I'd guess we're ALL at a loss to explain this one. Feeble attempts being made at the moment, including mine. I guess it's human nature to try to make sense of stuff, including the stuff there's no way to make sense of.

Hey cilla4progress! Congrats on becoming "Miss 60"!

I'll be 62 this year. So far I'm finding it quite survivable! And I know how you feel - "very philosophical, very fortunate, and very blessed." And you never know when your number's up. It's just one of those things.



SHIT! I had a tear in my eye (been there all morning), and I just happened to glance up at the body of your post, and saw the "Maybe religion isn't the right word, or framing..." and for a moment I thought "framing" was "farting."

fuuuuuuck...

Thank you my dear Peggy.

I feel like crying. And I have NO connection to this tragedy at all. Didn't know anybody on there. My daughter and her fiance are over there now, on kind of a pre-honeymoon, but they left Barcelona for parts west of there. That's as close as I got, Thank You, GOD.

"There is no rhyme or reason. There is only the chilling reminder that we live precariously and die randomly, and that there is honor in facing each day with purpose and grace." - Steve Lopez

A keeper. I'm gonna add it to my quotes collection.



You make me think of FLyellowdog and some thoughts we shared in late February before we lost her. In the end, all we have is the Now, and Each Other.

Man, I know, in a small way, how you feel. Just gives me this sick feeling inside.

You're not alone. This story is gonna be bothering me all day, too. Probably a whole lot of people are feeling the same way today - even those (like me) who are far removed from a tragedy like this.

Yeah, that, too. Truly. It's hard to accept.

It's hard to understand. Very true - it's hard to justify. And I'm not trying to make any excuses. It just doesn't make sense. Yet I do find myself wondering what could have caused him to do this. Nobody just does something like this on a lark, seems to me. But I'm certainly no expert.

Might not even be hatred. He could have been despondent. Hopeless.

In a very dark place. Maybe in that state of mind, you don't even have the presence-of-mind to think about anybody else. You're just in deep desperate darkness. Convinced that no one can help, that the situation is un-correctable, beyond desperate? Maybe he'd been nursing this silently, alone, for awhile? Maybe he'd been trying to push it aside? And just move on? And he just couldn't? And he finally snapped? I don't know that anyone will ever be able to determine what drove him to do this. Makes me think of Robin Williams.

It's so sad. Horribly sad. Heartbreaking.

Welcome to DU, oldlib2.

Glad you're here. I'm just really personally messed up by the very thought of this. My husband's a pilot, not of jets, certainly. Just at the civil aviation level. This is so damn sad, so distressing. I feel so terrible for all those people - I guess it was the reports that tell of people in the plane being heard screaming. They probably knew at some point that they were doomed. How horrible is that!

And I actually feel for that copilot, too. I guess there's no way to know why. Haven't heard anything in the coverage about him facing being fired or reprimanded. Can't help but wonder if his personal life had caved in on him in one way or another. Girlfriend dumped him? Friend betrayed him (or that's how he saw it)? We may never know what made him do this, if indeed it was one of those "goodbye cruel world" kinds of things. One has to be in a pretty dark place to do something like this.

Yes. And in Texas, too.