Here we go.

Another shooting spree, another media melee, another 15 minutes for anybody with a pet cause to promote.

I don’t expect any better from the media. Senseless tragedy is good business for the yakking classes. With the whole nation watching, they get to ordain heroes, condemn villains, and indulge in the kind of self-serving histrionics that would be roundly condemned as bias under less sensational circumstances.

And I’ve come to accept that packs of opportunistic jackals will always be lurking outside the newsroom, hungry for a chance to feast upon the misfortunes of others and twist violence and heartbreak to their own purposes. On Friday, with news reports from Newtown still confused and largely news-free, the Usual Suspects were already standing tall atop their soapboxes demanding more gun control, or less gun control, or increased spending on schools, or increased funding for mental health initiatives, or, incredibly, the imposition of a mandatory national program of cradle-to-grave psychological profiling designed to detect mass-murderers before they go off the rails. While all of those topics may individually contain some particle of merit (except, perhaps, the last one), hoisting them up on the backs of slaughtered innocents not yet cold is simply unconscionable.

Sadly, exploiting tragedy has been a favored tactic of the ruthless at least since the year 1002, when King Ethelred II, unable to control the sporadic Viking raids plaguing England’s coasts and tired of hearing his subjects whine about it, ordered the murder of every Dane within his realm. The “Saint Brice’s Day Massacre”, as it became known, did nothing to dissuade the Viking raiders, but had a pronounced calming affect upon Ethelred’s domestic critics. As luck would have it, Denmark’s ruler grieved for about two minutes before using that abuse of his countrymen as justification to invade England and sieze Ethelred’s throne.

But if hijacking another’s misery in pursuit of personal ends enjoys a long and ignoble history, it may be that the Modern Era’s fascination with Social Media has plunged that abhorrent practice to new lows of thoughtless self-indulgence. I’m talking about what, for lack of a better name, I’ve come to think of as the Sympathy Games.

By nightfall on Friday, Dec. 14, Facebook was alive with posts professing infinite, abject, soul-rending horror at the events in Connecticut. The contestants seemed to feed off of each other, as each tortured memoriam begat another of even greater anguish and empathy, a ghoulish competition to see who would wear the crown of Most Compassionate.

“I’m heartbroken. It seems like a bad dream.”

“I cried last night. I can’t even believe what I’m reading.”

“I feel physically sick. I can’t stop crying.” 

“I’m totally devastated. I feel like I lost one of my own children.”

“I already called in sick to work tomorrow. I feel overwhelmed with grief for those children and their families. I’m going to stay home and pray for them.”

 And, of course, about a thousand variations on the theme “I beg you – hug your children. Love them. Just love them.”

Don’t get me wrong. No person of ordinary mental composition could learn of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary and not feel strong emotion. I feel anger toward the craven worm who took whatever beef he had with his mother/associates/society and turned it against a bunch of 6-year-olds who, almost by definition, were incapable of committing any injustice against him. I feel a deep sympathy toward the slain children and their families – lives senselessly cut short, and other lives forever blighted. And I feel a weary frustration that there’s little a free and open society can do to prevent pathetic mongrels like Adam Lanza from exploiting a generally trusting public to murderous purpose.

On the other hand, reason and nature prevent reasonable people from becoming unnaturally affected by events outside their own lives. A massacre of innocents is a terrible thing, but the world conjures a dozen terrible things on every day of the week. Where is the out-sized outpouring of despair when a ferry accident in Asia kills hundreds? Or a mudslide in South America kills thousands?

Is Newtown somehow worse because most of the victims were children? This week in America some 130 children will die in car accidents. Another 20 will drown, 10 more will die of burns, and 25 will suffocate. Those are grim statistics, but ones that we’ve come to terms with, because the alternative would be mental and social paralysis. And affectations of “shock” over mass killings in the supposed “safe haven” of school ring hollow against the 10 that have occurred in Canada, the 19 in Europe, the 12 in Asia and the Middle East, and the 13 that have taken place in the U.S. during the last decade alone.

It is simply not in the human mental apparatus to become emotionally incapacitated by tragedies that have absolutely no direct impact on our own lives. We care, yes, but we carry on.

So how to explain the agonizing flood of commiseration that jumped Twitter’s banks last Friday and is only now beginning to subside? I list the probable causes here in acending order of offensiveness.

Hysteria: I recognize that some people are just too close to the surface. You know the ones I mean. They throw things at the TV when the Broncos turn one over. They think every song on the radio is speaking directly to their heart. They hyperventilate at birth announcements, sob uncontrollably at a third-cousin’s wedding, and take every word, gesture and expression that comes their way as a personal judgment. These people can be forgiven their emotive excesses, as they are, themselves, victims of their own unstable psychological geology.

Schadenfreude: I certainly don’t mean to suggest that all of those rabid posters actually take pleasure in the deaths of children, but I am absolutely certain they love feeling bad about it. There exists a well-established human desire to associate oneself with events percieved as great, or important, or, in this case, dramatic. Fact is, lots of people take pleasure in inserting themselves into the triumphs and tragedies of others. It’s that impulse that drives people to hold a candle at vigils for people to whom they have no connection, or to buy a commemorative Royal Wedding plate, or to vote on American Idol. Apparently not satisfied with the tame spectacle of their own lives, they borrow the drama of strangers. Since Friday, their game has been to insert themselves into the Newtown narrative and claim for themselves a supporting role as aggreived spirit, albeit one at a comfortable distance. By being so very shaken and shattered by the killings, they become co-victims deserving of both sympathy for their sufferings and admiration for their strength. It’s a shabby form of recreation of which they should be ashamed.

Self-aggrandizement: This is the Sympathy Games at their most despicable. I care more than you do. You are sad, I am bereft. You prayed last night, I skipped work to pray all day. You hug your children because you suddenly understand how precious they are, I beg everyone else to hug theirs because my love of children is unselfish and all-encompassing. And heaven forbid anyone should think I’m not caring enough.It’s a contest of compassion, self-indulgent boast-fest, and everybody wins so long as nobody catches you cutting fresh powder at Copper Mountain when you’re supposed to be at home praying. It’s exploitation of another’s misfortune for personal gain, and if it’s less public than stumping for a high-capacity magazine ban on Today’s Weekend Edition, it’s no less contemptible.

We are weak creatures, and vain, and naturally thoughtless. In their hearts, most of the people falling all over themselves to appear heartbroken almost certainly believe they are expressing the appropriate emotional response to a horrific crime, and that it’s a true – if somewhat robustly-stated – reflection of their true feelings. I would like to believe that they are all perfectly sincere in their majestic grief, but I don’t. I’m too old, and have seen too much to believe that. To those for whom the Sandy Hook tragedy has become a temporary entertainment, I say “stop it.”

The Connecticut slaughter was, and is, an outrage against decency, and a crime against our shared humanity. Hate it all you like, and then hate it some more. But don’t own it.

As much as you’d like it to be, Sandy Hook is not your tragedy. You have no right to be “devasted” or “overwhelmed”, because your circle is intact. You are not brave because bad news is not the same thing as adversity. You have earned neither sympathy nor admiration because you’ve lost nothing worthy of pity, nor done anything worthy of praise.

Be sad. Be angry. Recommit your life to good works. Hug your children, but please don’t feel obligated to inform me in advance. By all means pray, but not to everybody on Facebook, but to a loving God who will gather the murdered innocents unto Himself.

The massacre in Newtown is the worst kind of tragedy, and it’s not about you. It belongs solely and wholly to the children and teachers who died there, and to the people who loved them.

Then and now, we are not all Columbine.