Are candlelight vigils the appropriate response to evil?

[Right_in_Virginia]

Are candlelight vigils the appropriate response to evil?
American Thinker, Feb 16, 2018, Ed Straker

I've always felt a little uncomfortable about candlelight vigils in response to man-made tragedies.

Certainly, if people are killed by a deranged criminal, friends of the victims want to meet and have a memorial to remember their friends.  But when someone guns down 17 people in a school, and a large number of people gather, apparently entirely unarmed, to mourn with candles, there seems something a little odd about that.

I mean, if people are protesting the fact that a bunch of unarmed kids were slaughtered by a guy with a gun, by gathering, also without arms, aren't they just inviting the same thing to happen again?  How does mourning those who were lost do anything to prevent the same thing from happening again?  It feels like a wholly inadequate response to evil.


Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/02/are_candlelight_vigils_the_appropriate_response_to_evil.html

[Sanguine]

No.

And, in fact, someone on the news last referred to it as the "victims' vigil".  No, we need to quit being victims and get mad.

[Right_in_Virginia]

I would think there would be rallies that looked more like this:



https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/02/are_candlelight_vigils_the_appropriate_response_to_evil.html

Very interesting essay ...

[The_Reader_David]

The appropriate response? No. An appropriate response, and part of the appropriate response, yes.

Back in the day when I was part of the Penn Young Americans for Freedom chapter, we held a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Soviet downing of KAL 007.  I spoke quoting Solzhenitsyn about the dividing line between good and evil not running between countries or social systems, but down the center of the human heart.  The one leftist who turned up to see what the heck would happen at a YAF-sponsored candlelight vigil went away impressed.  (We figured, why should the left have a monopoly on candlelight vigils?)

Actually, a full-on vigil, staying up all night praying, whether candle lit or not, is a good response to a lot of evils.

[Sanguine]

The appropriate response? No. An appropriate response, and part of the appropriate response, yes.

Back in the day when I was part of the Penn Young Americans for Freedom chapter, we held a candlelight vigil for the victims of the Soviet downing of KAL 007.  I spoke quoting Solzhenitsyn about the dividing line between good and evil not running between countries or social systems, but down the center of the human heart.  The one leftist who turned up to see what the heck would happen at a YAF-sponsored candlelight vigil went away impressed.  (We figured, why should the left have a monopoly on candlelight vigils?)

Actually, a full-on vigil, staying up all night praying, whether candle lit or not, is a good response to a lot of evils.

I could actually get behind a vigil that was mostly praying - not just "sending our thoughts" or moments of silence.