Why clichés make us human and why they should be a comfort today

I wrote this the day after the Aurora theatre shooting in July 2012 as a way to understand my own reaction to that tragedy and the reactions I was seeing all over social media and the news.  It makes me sick that we've experience so many days like that day, and so I wanted to share these thoughts that I found comforting in the wake of senseless violence.

Why clichés make us human and why they should be a comfort today

The words “shocked and saddened,” “my heart goes out,” and “thoughts and prayers” are everywhere at tragic moments like this.  Sometimes, I begin to think that their overuse makes the tragedy itself cliché and even trite.  I become easily irritated by every public official and teenage girl who seem to be pulling lines from the same script.  For a moment earlier today, however, it occurred to me that there’s a certain humanity in these clichés.  Since that moment, observing these words all over the internet and news has been a comforting phenomenon to behold.

Humans aren’t built to truly understand death, particularlythe type of senseless murder that happened last night.  We over use those words, because we very simply don’t know how to express our reaction; murder, especially illogically vicious, unprovoked, and thoughtless murder, is antithetical to our nature.  We are programmed to survive and to value life at all costs or else risk the failure of the human race.

We’ve persisted millennia based on our innate will to survive, and so yes, we over use “shocked and saddened” when faced with such an atrocious example of inhuman destruction.  Our intrinsic and instinctive humanity rejects such actions in the name of our resolute drive to survive – not alone, but as a group, community, nation, and even race.

It's almost comforting that we're unable to understand the indiscriminate and brutal murder of 12 people in a move theater. Something so horrific shouldn’t make sense to us.  The shooter did not do this to make sense – there is no sense to find.  Instead, the only thing that makes any sense to people today is to express one of our most evolved elements of human nature: empathy.  The reoccurrence of “shocked and saddened” or “prayers and thoughts are with…” all over Facebook and Twitter becomes a beautifully synced human reaction of empathy – the only sensible reaction to this destruction.   It’s like fireflies in a park or field during the early summer; if you watch long enough, you’ll see them light up in unison to communicate with each other – just to let the other ones know they’re there, that they’re not alone. 

Our minds cannot comprehend the awful power of one sick human, and so we rely on a common and now cliché language of empathy to express that we are bound together – that we are united in our shock and sadness. That’s it – no extra political statement, no extraneous statement on a personal experience of this tragedy.  It’s an expression of shared human nature, and I’m comforted to have observed that cliché today.

So certainly, these phrases have become overused, and there is a comforting human beauty in that.