The Sutherland Springs church massacre seems like a lifetime of news cycles ago to most of us, but not to those who are still suffering in the aftermath of that horrific attack. So many people were murdered or maimed while worshiping in the heart of their community, the church.
The people of Sutherland Springs are trying to heal. The last thing they need are conspiracy theorist lunatics harassing them, claiming the massacre didn’t really happen.
That’s what happened to Frank Pomeroy, pastor of Sutherland Springs Baptist Church.
Robert Ussery, 54, and Jodi Mann, 56, are conspiracy theorists who argue that the brutal slaying of 26 people last year was a hoax crafted by the Department of Homeland Security. They were arrested after they harassed the pastor, when a congregant witnessed the confrontation and called the police.
The claims are especially hurtful to Pomeroy. He lost his 14-year-old granddaughter in the attack.
“We’ve already had to deal with one person that lived in an alternate reality,” Pomeroy said, referring to the individual who murdered her and his congregants.
Ussery and Mann are two of an alarming number of people who tend to view massacres and other major incidents not as tragedies, but as elaborate hoaxes perpetrated by sociopaths in the United States government. The two men host a site that shares their insane, absurd ideas with the world.
Why are some people unable to accept a tragedy as being a tragedy? Why must some people make up ludicrous stories to imagine the act of one evil person to be the work of countless evil people?
I’m not a psychologist, but these two must be suffering from some mental affliction, as nothing in this smacks of reason and intellect. This is emotion-driven nonsense. It sounds like Ussery and Mann can’t deal with the simple fact that awful people can do inexplicable things, so they try to find a “rational” motivation to give them some bizarre sort of satisfaction.
Which is fine, ultimately — they have the right to think crazy things. After all, an absurd number of people in this country are believers in communism and socialism.
But they don’t have the right to harass people who don’t share their delusions. They don’t have the right to harass anyone, and they cross a moral red line when they harass someone forever mourning the loss of a grandchild.
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