Baton Rouge — It has become fashionable on the left to mock the offering of “thoughts and prayers,” the usual banality seen on social media after a natural disaster or a terrorist massacre, shared by people unconnected to the event but compelled, by self-importance or political interests or both, to connect themselves to it. Comedienne Samantha Bee threw a profanity-laced fit over “thoughts and prayers” after the Orlando massacre, and Corey Ciorciari, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s gun-policy guy, mocked such goodwill expressions after the police ambush in Baton Rouge: “Thoughts and prayers didn’t seem to stop the last 193 mass shootings this year,” he wrote. “Maybe we should try something different?” Never mind that Mrs. Clinton is herself a big thoughts-and-prayerser, having sent them out to the victims in Charleston and Nepal, Eid al-Adha celebrants in Mecca, the French, etc. It’s the ultimate exercise in 2016-style political discourse: a shallow and mean-hearted shiv of a shallow and good-hearted sentiment.
Here in Baton Rouge, thoughts and prayers are the main things holding the city together.
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