Bill Clinton took issue with Chris Wallace on national TV. Everybody has an opinion. Did Clinton overreact? Was he justified? No comment.

But I’m guessing Bill wishes he hadn’t lost his cool. It reminds me of something I once heard Dallas Willard say. It went something like this: “You never do anything better when you’re angry.”

I wish I remembered that more often. And Bill Clinton probably does, too.

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Yesterday I wrote about Cassidy Grigg, a student at Platte Canyon High School who supposedly told the gunman he didn’t want to leave and wanted to stay with the girls.

Turns out it didn’t happen. Cassidy admitted he lied on national TV but said he made up the lie because he “wanted it to be true.”

I was disappointed as I’m sure were the others who innocently spread his deception. But this morning I felt more sympathy than I did when I first heard the news last night.

First, Grigg, like all the students at this school, were traumatized. And in the pain of dealing with the situation, this young man probably felt the helplessness and wished he could have helped his classmates. This probably contributed to his deception.

He isn’t a hero. And if my speculation is accurate, it doesn’t make what he did right. But it does make it at least understandable.

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We’re still trying to figure out what happened yesterday when a gunman took six students hostage in Platte Canyon High School in Bailey, CO. Details are still coming in, but the most tragic is the shooting death of 16-year-old Emily Keyes. My heart and prayers go out to her family.

In local coverage, I read about a young man I consider a hero, although you might not hear about him. When the gunman entered the classroom, he approached each male student and told him to get out. Cassidy Grigg said, “No, I want to stay with the girls.” At that point the gunman forced him out at gunpoint.

I don’t know anything more about Cassidy or his family, but it seems to me that most people would run for their lives when ordered out of an area by a deranged gunman. Cassidy evidently put the safety of others above his own in trying to stay and protect his female classmates.

That makes him a hero in my book.

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I’ve seen lots of odd and interesting behavior on airplanes, but this situation was new.

Parents of a three year old in coach objected to the inflight movie which happened to be X-Men. They didn’t want their child to be “exposed” to it. I was curious so I observed the logistics: the three year old couldn’t see over the seat to the nearest screen two rows ahead which was only slightly larger than a postage stamp (I exaggerate, but not by much). And the movie required purchase, so unless the objecting parents paid for headsets, the kid couldn’t hear the movie either.

I certainly appreciate parents trying to protect their children from negative images (I just wrote another blog about that), but in this case, over 100 passengers watched a different movie (and one many had seen since this was a return flight) because of two parents.

Of course most inflight movies are terrible, and I rarely watch any. But it strikes me as incredibly self-centered to potentially penalize many other paying passengers because of a seemingly oversensitive concern for what your child is exposed to. (A simple solution: take responsibility for keeping your child engaged in a book or game rather than stretching to watch the tiny screen showing a possibly unsavory movie. Of course the common entertainment is to let the kid kick the seat ahead of him or her for several hours.)

So the replacement movie turned out to be The Poseidon Adventure. Evidently images of passengers being crushed to death and drowned was the lesser of two evils. I hope the three year old didn’t get a glimpse of that.

Too bad kids can’t be protected from poor parenting.

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Do the images of very think super models negatively affect young women? There are some in the fashion industry who say they don’t.

Do the images in advertising, whether print or TV, influence people to buy products? Billions of dollars taken from advertisers indicate that they do.

Do the violent images of computer games have an adverse affect on the behavior of some gamers? Interestingly, the same game companies that spend millions on advertising claim that the images of their games don’t affect behavior. Do you find that as contradictory as I do?

It seems the general consensus among those who stand to profit is that images can influence “desired behavior” (buying) but not “antisocial behavior” (negative actions).

What a crock…

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