Aurora, Co.

Beyond the sheer horror and tragedy of the shooting and beyond the loss of innocent lives, the most disturbing thing about this situation is the conversation about how The Dark Knight will do in the box office now.

Lives are lost. People are grieving. The movie’s success DOES NOT MATTER.

I’m a Christopher Nolan fan. I say go see the movie so that evil cannot win nor have a foothold of fear in our lives…but at the end of the day, do it to honor the victims and their families, not for the sake of the entertainment industry.

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis describes the Motivation of Evil as “the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.” He says, “none ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong–only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him….Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.”

Whatever motivation the shooter had, we know it was parasitic and evil — nothing original, valiant, or special. And therefore we won’t allow him to turn our gaze from the precious lives lost to the movie industry’s loss. We won’t do it.