This is a reminder to everyone that if you live in the Allentown, Pennsylvania region, I will be in YOUR neck of the woods in two weeks:

The tragic events on Thursday night…

I really haven’t said too much about the tragic events of Thursday night’s midnight premiere of The Dark Knight – either here, on Facebook or in other places. In some ways, I’m still trying to grasp why this would happen. It’s so very sad because, like so many of us, I love going to movies. I love the smell of theater popcorn… I love seeing previews on a huge screen… I love getting to the movie theater 20 minutes early and talking to my wife or friends about things that are happening in our lives while stupid commercials for local pawn shops play on the big screen. For me, the theater is a way to escape reality for a few hours – just as it was for all those folks in Colorado last week. And now that world was shattered by someone who had a huge need to be sensational by killing innocent folks of all ages… men, women and children.

The most heart wrenching stories for me though, have been the tales of those unfortunate victims that threw themselves on top of loved ones in order to protect their friends, family and loved ones even as they ended up sacrificing their lives. We like to pin the “hero” label on a lot of different people for things that might be considered admirable but not really TRULY heroic. Well, last Thursday, there were a lot of people in that Colorado theatern that were REAL heroes. It’s just so, so sad that they had to prove it with their lives.

This is what we should remember about the event – not the sick, twister and perverted perp who did this. Unfortunately, in this day and age of sensational journalism, that is going to be so very, very hard to do.