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It’s easy to imagine this only happens to the bad, bad children of bad, bad parents. I had such a notion, back when I thought I knew how to be a good father. But most days, these days, I struggle to be a decent father. I snap at one of my sons, and I see his heart close up. I get caught up in work or distraction and a precious day is gone, another day I didn’t knit up the ever-fraying bonds between father and sons. I want to believe a parent has to be utterly negligent to yield a boy gunning down people on street corners, but then I think of that woman weeping in her bed over her lost, monstrous son, and I don’t know. I simply don’t know.

- Tony Woodlief in a post called “The Loughner boy’s eyes.”

via Daily Dish

I don’t know the first thing about Tony Woodlief. That’s not quite true. I’ve done the laziest kind of vetting imaginable: 30 seconds with his Twitter feed.

Do I know what kind of chummy joshing or bigoted scorn was in Woodlief’s heart when he tweeted that “George Michael’s sissy-boy rendition of ‘Last Christmas’ probably set the gay rights movement back at least 20 years”? No, I don’t. But I’m trying to struggle against one of my more pointless, time-wasting instincts: the urge, when I taste wisdom, to postpone dishing it up for others until I’ve inspected the kitchen of origin for health-code violations.

There’s wisdom and humility and humanity and empathy in the quote at the top of this post. Let’s just leave it at that.