Folks, I'm losing my grasp on grace

When right-wingers dance on the grave of murder victims

On Monday morning I sat down, opened my laptop to social media and suddenly cried out in anguish.

Josh Kruger — a freelance journalist whom I knew during my years living and working in Philadelphia — was dead, brutally murdered in his own home.

Shot seven times.

I cannot claim that Josh was my friend. We were friendly. He was a gay man whose sometimes-radical stances frankly made me uncomfortable at times. That’s my problem. But during my few in-person encounters with him, he was a smiling and welcoming presence.

I was so glad to know him. Here are some nice tributes by Philadelphia writers.

Josh — like so many of us — could scrap on social media. He was doing it right to the end. Last week, he made fun (justifiably in my view) of Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ 2020 prediction that “Republicans will be hunted” if Joe Biden won the presidency.

Adams, naturally, decided to dance on Josh’s grave.

This isn’t the only example of this kind of behavior this week. In New York, a “beloved social justice activist” named Ryan Carson was stabbed to death walking home after a wedding. The brutal act was caught on video. And some notable right-wingers danced on his grave as well.

Folks, I don’t believe for a second that Hanania doesn’t like gloating. How ghoulish.

Checking myself here: Folks on the left can be cruel when prominent right-wingers die. I certainly wrote critically about Rush Limbaugh after he died, though I don’t think I gloated about the death itself. I might be guilty of the behavior I’m decrying here. But I hope not.

As I’ve said before: I’m not a Christian these days. But the command to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” still lingers in the back of my head constantly as an imperative.

Right now, I’m not feeling it. And that scares me a bit. I don’t want to become what I hate. Both Josh and Ryan Carson died scared and in pain. Nobody deserves that. They didn’t deserve the posthumous sneering from the right either.