Michelle Obama sat silently, a First Lady holding hands with an astronaut, two middle-aged people in the grip of grief and hope, as the President made his speech.
Now she adds words of her own in an open letter to parents, citing “questions my daughters have asked…the same ones that many of your children will have” and urging them to talk about the goodness of the victims, especially nine-year-old Christina Taylor Green, of whom the President said, “She was off to meet her congresswoman, someone she was sure was good and important.”
A tough-minded blogger takes exception to the President’s image from a book about babies born on 9/11–“If there are rain puddles in heaven, Christina is jumping in them today”–but can’t stop thinking about it until he decides it’s “appropriate to a memorial for a child” after all.
The lasting afterglow from the President’s speech recalls the mood after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, when a psychiatrist wrote that for weeks his patients stopped talking about their personal problems to pour out their feelings about the loss of someone they knew only from images on a TV screen.
In days and weeks to come, in this short-attention world, Tuscon will likely recede under the flood of 24/7 blather, but at least one Pulitzer-Prize political historian, Garry Wills, sees a more lasting effect, comparing Obama to Lincoln after visiting the wounded:
“Their message to him was one of dedication: ‘They believed, and I believe, that we can be better.’ This rang a bell with me…
MORE.