There is a song from the classic musical HAIR, and it asks the essential question:
“How Can People Be So Heartless?
How Can People Be So Cruel?
Easy To Be Hard.
Easy To Be Cold.”
Maybe for some people it IS easy to be hard and cold. But HOW and WHY? I wish I knew the answer to those questions.
Ironically, Jennifer Hudson did a remake of that song a couple of years ago. She sang the HELL out of it then. I bet, if she sang it now, it would be with so much heart and pleading emotionalism that it would bring a torrent of tears to most anyone’s eyes.
I've sat here for 15 minutes trying to figure out what I could say or write that would clearly communicate the weight and the sincere meaning of what I am feeling for Jennifer Hudson, and her sister, Julia, and the rest of their family, but I can't. Words fail me.
What can you possibly say to someone whose mother, brother, and little seven-year-old nephew were senselessly murdered?
The Hudson family is in my prayers today, and yet they are not alone.
I have no words for the abusive Brooklyn mother who beat her 11-year-old daughter to death with a mop handle and left her to die in her own bed.
I have no words for the 25 year-old woman in Queens whose throat was slit, and who was stabbed to death, while she was nine-months pregnant.
I have no words.
I don’t know why some 18 year-old-kid would kill his parents, set their home on fire and afterwards laugh, while drinking wine nearby with his girlfriend.
I don’t know why someone takes a gun onto a college campus and shoots young people to death.
I have no words.
I don’t know why in nearby Newark NJ, people are shot to death while standing on the street. Two of them died this weekend.
All these tragic occurrences happened in the course of a rainy October weekend.
I know no words.
I guess, as the song says, it’s EASY TO BE HARD.
I don’t understand that heartless nature in people. I just don’t fuckin’ GET IT.
I wonder if pure evil exists and grows more muscular in the hearts of mankind, or if it’s all some sickness in the mind that disguises itself as evil.
I don’t know what will become of the people left behind who will live to mourn, wail, ask why, and try to make sense of the senseless loss of those they loved.
I have no words.
I do believe in God.
I do believe in taking our grief to Him and allowing Him to work His own gentle miracle of transference.
I do believe wholeheartedly in Karma for those who perpetrate acts of evil. .
Most of all, I believe in love.
And so in the spirit of love and condolence, I pray for some semblance of spiritual peace to be placed inside the hearts of those left behind.
And so in the spirit of love and sympathy, I'm mustering up all the Compassion, Tears, and Prayers I can access that your stricken families hold on to each other and know that God, The Creator will embrace you.
That’s all that's really left to believe in anymore.
Because these days, it seems a little too Easy To Hard.
One Love.
