In the middle of Tennessee a person with few clothes and less sense shot up a Waffle House, leaving four dead.
In the heart of Arizona, a former NFL kicker in golf attire and two well-dressed teenagers tried to make a joke, leaving millions outraged.
Wishing my beautiful daughter and her date a great time at prom #BadBoys pic.twitter.com/T5JRZQYq9e
— Jay Feely (@jayfeely) April 22, 2018
Yep, that's where we are.
It's more than sad. It's un-American.
Jay Feely, a self-made, ready-for-Disney-movie success story, stood between his daughter and her boyfriend for a pre-prom photo this weekend. He posted the picture on Twitter with the caption ""Wishing my beautiful daughter and her date a great time at prom #BadBoys."
He did so with a gun - an unloaded gun - in his right hand.
And you would have thought he had burned the Constitution, slapped his momma and took a knee during the national anthem. Strike that last one. This reaction has been even more ridiculous.
First, let's start with the three most fundamental joke lines in the history of jokes.
There are mother-in-law jokes. There are "your momma" jokes. And there are the jokes about dads not liking their daughters' dates.
If you want to be mad at Feely for being unoriginal, well, fine.
But sweet buckets of social outrage, we have officially arrived at a dangerous intersection. Everything is teetering on the line of offensive. Everything is a whisker away from releasing the internet morality mob.
Feely felt the need to apologize, although he did absolutely nothing wrong. He likely apologized because the next step in his career is as a football analyst with CBS Sports, completing a sports trek that started at Michigan, took him through walk-on tryouts in the Arena League before spending 14 years in the NFL.
While he was with the New York Jets in the late 2000s, here's how The New York Times described him in October 2009: "Feely dispenses opinions the way vending machines do snacks - all day, with variety. He is the Jets' titan of Twitter, a kicker who leads like a quarterback, a licensed stockbroker who parents, plays golf, prays, holds political aspirations, devours books, debates - and sends all that into cyberspace, no more than 140 characters at a time."
Jay GreesonThree months before that article, Feely put this on social media: "Here's my issue with both our political parties right now. No one has the guts and ability to find the real answers and commit to them."
Almost a decade later, because we apparently have lost any sense of humor, Feely was forced to go back to Twitter and post this on Sunday: "The prom picture I posted was obviously intended to be a joke. My Daughter has dated her boyfriend for over a year and they knew I was joking. I take gun safety seriously (the gun was not loaded and had no clip in) and I did not intend to be insensitive to that important issue."
Sadly, the outraged are no longer the outliers. Be it Feely or Shania Twain feeling the need to apologize for saying if she were allowed to vote, she would have voted for Trump, it's clear that far too much of our collective conscientiousness is based in the thought, "You are entitled to your opinion as long as it matches my opinion."
As bad as that seems, the madcapped, bleeding-heart bullying has become overwhelming. And nauseating.
We have left the station of Common Sense, a place where folks try to listen or at least understand another side whether they ever will agree with it, and arrived right in the middle of Outrage Central.
And we're all worse for it.
Contact Jay Greeson at jgreeson@timesfreepress.com and 423-757-6343.