Our nation thrives on two things: heroes and grieving, with a good story connecting the two.

The Virginia Tech shootings are playing that out. The culture of grieving and sadness has been commodified and packaged as surely as a box of Froot Loops. Obligatory photos of college students consoling one another, mass convocations and candlelight vigils, the endless articles on what to say to your son, daughter, mother, father, niece, nephew, cousin, co-worker, friend, lover, cat, dog and goldfish in these troubled times.

To get on with life without going through the media-sanctioned process is to be labeled "insensitive," "callous" or simply "empty." The phrase we heard after 9/11 was "too soon," applied to everything from jokes to big-budget movies to sports to eating out to...well, whatever we held off doing before the signal flares went up saying we could do it.

Regardless of whether it's "too soon," here're a couple of quotes from Hokie students in Blacksburg, interviewed on the news -- you judge how "cream of the crop" these students are:

"Sure, they died right away, but it's the rest of us that will have to live with this pain for the rest of our lives."

-- and --

"Wow...I guess this campus isn't as safe as I thought!"

Guess not.

We receive contradictory messages from politicians and news anchors and are then confounded when we're unsure when to start crawling, walking, running up to full speed. Blowhard ex-FBI profilers lash out at Cho Seung-Hui's What I'm About To Do Before Summer Vacation media package, insisting they would never have given Cho a public platform -- all the while cashing the networks' checks to blather on and on about Cho. NBC tells us how hard they wrestled with the decision to make public Cho's photos, videos and manifesto, then hope we'll rubberneck at the killer's unnerving visuals without a second thought. "We wrestled without our conscience so you don't have to," NBC is saying. They're lying, but that's what they do seem to actually believe it.

Luckily for America, there were heroes in Blacksburg as well -- professors who were shot to death as they helped students escape, and students who held doors shut. Brave, selfless people.

Is Villainy the absence of Heroism? Is Heroism the absence of Villainy? No, it's not that simple -- unless you're writing headlines or piecing together the nightly news' lead story.

The sports world has been relatively muted. Two nights ago the Washington Nationals wore Virginia Tech baseball caps as a tribute, and last night a scattering of other major leaguers, on their own, followed suit. A spontaneous act, a good deal more heartfelt than a league mandate based on a consultant's suggestion. But wait for it...wait for it...there'll be the usual pre-packaged, instructions-included grieving procedures -- the sports world, as usual, is a little slow on the uptake.

A friend of ours who arrived yesterday from Derry, Ireland reports that the English and Irish media are reporting, and peoples' water-cooler and pub talk is saying, that the Va Tech killings prove it: Americans are nuts.

We are. Face it. We have 200 million guns in this country. Cho Seung-Hui obeyed every gun purchasing law in Virginia. It's easy to blame the National Rifle Association for this one...so easy that's exactly what we'll do.

Virginia's gun laws are as NRA-friendly as any in the nation -- and Cho followed them straight up. Well, not all -- by concealing his handguns until he started killing people, Cho violated the state's concealment regs, which the NRA wishes weren't a law -- though they're happy Virginia requires you to openly display your licensed firearms.

Aside from killing people with previously-concealed guns, Cho Seung-Hui was a perfect NRA poster boy.

As usual when stuff like this happens, there's plenty of blame to go around. Campus and local cops barking up the wrong tree...all manner of officials who ignored the half-dozen red flags that Cho was a hero/grief story waiting to happen...school officials who didn't notify the campus population to head to safety -- wherever that might have been.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people...that's the NRA's tired and pathetic justification for encouraging the slow-death carpet bombing of America by guns.

People with guns kill people.

Republicans and conservatives hope the gun-control debate doesn't rear up again. Democrats, of course, lack the stones, as Rachel Maddow put it two days ago on her radio show, to bring it up. In fact, Harry Reid, terrified of the NRA, is urging America not to go too crazy about pushing for more stringent gun-control laws.

Actually, maybe Republicans do want a gun-control debate to re-emerge, just to watch Democrats repeatedly stab themselves with a butter knife.

Big-time shootings always ignite the "what is it about America?" debate. Why always here? What's in the water? What's with our culture? Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine explored the issue, demonstrating that Canada, which also has lots of guns, never suffers enraged-students-going-postal episodes. Maybe it's just too cold up there to lose one's mind.

Certainly in countries like England and France, fraught with the same fears as America (jobs, affordable housing, suspicion of immigrants, loss of world standing, recession, prior histories of violence), there'd be more Columbine and Blacksburg events if guns were readily available. In fact, guns are readily available throughout the world, and you know what? A lot of mass killings do happen.

If you want to avoid getting shot, maybe Canada's just the best place to live.

Everything fades. The Virginia Tech shootings will fade for all of us not directly involved, affected, crushed. We'll cross the "too soon" line momentarily. Something else will happen. But 'til it does, we'll let ourselves be put through the meatgrinders of pre-packaged grieving and hero-worship that have been in place since 9/11. We'll likely forget to hold to the fire the feet of politicians who create hero myths but ignore the actual men and women they've used -- like Rudolph Giuliani and George Bush, who celebrated firefighters and Ground Zero rescue workers while denying them safety equipment and now healthcare and death benefits.

Meanwhile, Cho Seung-Chi proved he's George Bush's kind of guy -- a law-abiding gun-toting hothead who, when he didn't get his way, killed a lot of people to service an insane agenda of misanthropic, immature and suspect beliefs.

Stay tuned -- maybe you can be the hero the next time. For sure you can grieve along with everyone else -- just follow the instructions.

* * * * * * * *

Okay...that's the issue of the day.

Fans For Fair Play will be commenting more and more frequently on the world outside of Ratnerville. This is one of those times. We're not drawing any connections whatsoever between the Virigina Tech killings and the Ratner controversy.

None.

And we're not crassly piggybacking on the lead story to get you to read the following updates from here in Brooklyn.

Not.

But there're updates about the struggle against the Atlantic Yards colossus, and we want you to know about them.

Right here, we're faced with those uncomfortable seques that Keith Olbermann always mentions when shifting from a major story to his nightly round-up of celebrity news.

So let's just charge forward.

* * * * * * * *

Back in Ratnerville, lawsuits are shinging bright light on the Atlantic Yards' myriad shortcomings. In federal court, it's about eminent domain, and in state court, the faulty environmental impact process and renters' rights are the issues.

Project supporters overuse the dictum that these cases are last-ditch, desperate delay tactics. That's something you'd expect to hear from people who've done so much wrong, harmed so many people, turned neighbors against one another while plundering the public coffers and breaking both the spirit and letter of the law.

In fact, these cases are a way to thoroughly investigate the Atlantic Yards debacle. Politicans, with few exceptions, have drunk Ratner's Kool-Aid. Mainstream media has done the same. Brooklynites have mostly snoozed through the thing that will most change the economics, culture and physicality of our borough.

It's up to the courts to think this through. Ratner, and city and state officials, are telling you that democracy and justice shouldn't be served. If they really believe they've done nothing wrong, let the courts decide once and for all.

No matter what the Ratner people say -- and man himself maintains his Howard Hughes reclusion -- they're scared of these court cases.

Atlantic Yards proponents have spent three-and-a-half years trying to circumvent the just way of things. No one expects them to act differently with these court cases.

What should be different is that by now every single Brooklynite should have caught on to Team Ratner's shady dealings and deceitful operations.

* * * * * * * *

For some reason, Fans For Fair Play's Think Before You Drink campaign -- known more widely as the Brooklyn Brewery boycott -- is again getting play in the press. The campaign is still active and still letting people know that Brooklyn Brewery and its owner, Steve Hindy, support Bruce Ratner's skyscrapers and Nets arena.

Read more about our reasons for challenging a company that assists Ratner's taxpayer-financed skyscrapers with every bottle of beer it sells -- all the while claiming to stand for the little guy and Brooklyn's culture of small businesses. Brooklyn Brewery's support for Ratner, and their endorsement of the Greenpoint/Williamsburg rezoning that's driving out small businesses and moderate-income renters, proves they don't.

Finally, history still tells us that Barclays Bank, which is paying billions of dollars to have its name on Ratner's proposed arena, was involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, helped fund the South African apartheid regime, helped Nazis steal money from French Jews during World War II, was a defendant in the Enron scandal, plowed money into the murderous Congo civil war, and today is financing Robert Mugabe's internationally-condemned government in Zimbabwe.

Brooklynites of every color should be outraged that Ratner has cozied up to Barclays, an multi-national corporation that only stops doing bad things when it's caught -- or when there isn't enough profit to be made.

Ratner's nightmare vision for Brooklyn is still a long way off from being built. But if it is, do you want a reminder of slavery and apartheid -- and Ratner's alliance with those things -- beaming down at you from Frank Gehry's smashed-cube superblock towers everytime you look to the sky?

More on Barclays here and
here.