Editorial: Passion, responsibility and the job we all share

We live in a time of great passions. That also makes it a time of great responsibility.

The two words are not frequently linked. Indeed, we are often tempted to give someone a pass for being overcome by passion. That wasn't him, we will say. That wasn't her. Passion got the best of them.

But as the tragedy in Dallas starkly emphasizes, there almost is no time more demanding a sense of responsibility than that of high passion. Without it, an endless cycle of enmity spirals into ever more-alarming violence.

Not that our passions must be curbed. What reasonable person is not horrified by the naked assassination of five police officers, with even more wounded? What reasonable person is not horrified by the needless death of an individual detained or in policy custody? We cannot help our outrage.

But we can help how we express it, and on that score, we have so much work to do.

Some of that responsibility falls on the news media, certainly, particularly in the broadcast arena. In the rush for quick answers and ready explanations, outlets too easily succumb to reporting heavily weighted on speculation and emotional conjecture. For the 24-hour news channels striving constantly to evaluate confusing events even as chaos still reigns, such reporting is virtually an unchecked epidemic. On social media, where matters of context and nuance seem almost to have no place, it is barely short of a human crisis.

On that score, witness former U.S. Rep. Joe Walsh's rash tweet in the thick of the Dallas maelstrom that we are at "war" and warning the president of the United States that "real America" is "coming after" him. It was an irresponsible outburst that reflects poorly not only him as a former U.S. congressman but also on AM-560, the station that hosts his radio talk show locally. Walsh later took down the tweet and tried to suggest that it was misinterpreted and distorted.

And isn't that the very point?

For Walsh is hardly alone. From all points of view, social media sizzles constantly with such heated shouts of rage as if people are discussing complex social problems when in fact they're just trading emotional tirades over political ideologies - at that, tirades that stain whole groups of people with the actions or statements of tiny minorities.

Overwhelmingly, the people protesting in Dallas and other cities across the country on Thursday were behaving peacefully and lawfully. Apparently just one, according to the latest evidence, resorted to despicable violence. Tens of thousands of police officers behave every day with courage, kindness, respect and restraint. Yet, in the narrow confines of too many conversations, they all get stained by the rash actions of a rare few.

"We can't allow a small segment of our society to change who we are," Aurora police Lt. Jeff Wiencek said in a story we reported Saturday.

His words apply to more than police and the people they deal with. They apply for all of us, as does his next sentence: "Regardless of what happened to our brothers and sisters out there, we have a job to do that is much bigger than something as horrible as what occurred."

Those are words we should all remember, regardless of our profession or our station in life. Even in just learning to live together in peace, we all have a job to do that is much bigger than the isolated, if all too frequent, horrors that confront us.

If we do nothing else as we wrestle with our actions in a time of great passion, let's not lose sight of that job.