The worst kind of news.

I don't really know what to say about what happened in Norway. Every new image or story is more horrible than the one before it. Never before have I felt so acutely lacking in understanding than in a moment like this, how a man could slaughter children in the belief that he was defending his nation from the threat of Muslim "outsiders." I don't understand how this is possible, the same way I didn't understand how people claiming to be Muslims could kill innocent Americans in the name of what they also believed was faith.

I remember something David Letterman said after 9/11, something along the lines of that even if you lived to be a thousand years old, it would never make any sense. The terrorists on 9/11 professed that their actions stemmed from religious fervor. The man in Norway said he wanted to defend his homeland from the dangers of multiculturalism.

And maybe the only thing that any of us can take comfort in is that they were wrong, they were wrong in every way you can be wrong and this man (if he even deserves that label) was wrong in every way a human could be, and that it doesn't make sense and God willing never will to any of us. And it's our job to prove every day that they were wrong, to fight against the people who would align themselves in any way with those beliefs, no matter how slight or seemingly harmless a comment made about those things may seem to be.

It's not us against them. It's not them against us. Who the hell cares about Christian fundamentalists or Muslim fundamentalists or Christians or Muslims or any kind of sect or nationality or fundamentalist group there is in a moment like this? Children at a summer camp were killed in cold water as they tried to swim away from a man with a gun. As far as I'm concerned if religion leads to something like that then tear it all down and start over. That's why I can't stand it when anyone from any religion says that they are right and the everybody else is wrong, that their faith deserves to be spread and everyone else's deserves to be eliminated. What a sad and misguided way to see the world, what a horrible world view because it makes human beings who are different from you less valuable than you, and that kind of mindset, placed in a twisted or sick mind, can lead to something like this.

Can't we just be humans? Can't we come together if for no other reason than in the shared horror over such a violation of everything that's decent and good in this world? And can't we try, no matter where we live or who we are, to hack away at all of the hostility and ignorance and prejudice and fear that could fuel a man like that to do such a thing?

Nothing will ever make this right, but we can try, desperately, to prevent something from ever again being so wrong.