Why the moment of silence has suddenly become very political

SHEEHAN: I’ve helped a lot of people through things like this … and I’m saying this from a nonpartisan point-of-view, just a media-observer point of view: Things become cliche and become counterproductive.

In the corporate world, when something goes wrong, it’s, ‘We take these things very seriously,’ and it almost makes you snarl. And the phrase that is now in that category inside the Beltway for politicians is, ‘Our thoughts and prayers are with …’ It’s almost gone 180 degrees. Something that was meant, I believe, with the best of intentions, but is now having a negative repercussion.

THE FIX: But why is that?

SHEEHAN: The first thing that struck me this week, I was thinking about Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her [five] stages of grief. … Well, it seems to me that in the coverage of something like this, it gets condensed to four stages. First stage, shock. Second stage, sadness. Third, anger and then fourth, action.

And where you are in the country — and there is a difference between the epicenter of an event and the rest of the country — they are not on the same tracks, one usually gets ahead of the other. They may be in Stage 2 and we may be already going into Stage 3.