In the early mornings of a cold January day, people gasped in shock of the news headline. A movie regarding the little school of Sandy Hook was in the works. It had only been a mere two months since the country was rocked by the tragedy, and now it was being used as another step in someone else’s success.

Since the beginning of time, we have found a way to beat an agenda out of someone elses heartbreak. We use it as the steps to our great success, leaving it behind once we have sucked all we needed out of it. Tragedies today are becoming less tragic and more opportunistic to a changing culture with a changing view of the broken world and the terror it has to offer.

In November 2012, twenty little children were killed during a school shooting, and over the next few days the world caught its breath over what had happened in the once irrelevant town of Newtown. But after the smoke had cleared and the people of the small town tried to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives, the rest of the country went to battle over two very big issues.

For some, the option seemed clear on gun control, and the supporters did not leave the victims out of their stacks of support for their causes.

“Before you make up your mind about a proposed assault weapons ban, or stronger gun regulations, take it out of the abstract, look at the faces, and let it get personal. We owe that much to Dawn,” said one recent San Francisco Times article. Dawn Hochsprung was the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary school who gave her life to protect the children of her school. The innocence of a small town had been ripped from them and still news channels used the grief of others to make sure their agenda was heard.

Another article reached far back into the tragic history of school shootings and brought back up Columbine High School, where 15 students were killed using guns and explosives. Columbine High School was an average high school in Colorado that became the all around poster child for school shootings, so much so that people today have a tendency to whisper when they say it and lower their heads at the mention of it. Columbine was a tragedy served up to gun control supporters on a silver platter.

“When something as terrible as Columbine’s tragedy occurs, politicians immediately look for a scapegoat such as the NRA. They immediately seek to pass more restrictive law that continue to erode away our personal and private liberties,” said Darrell Scott, father of two of the victims at Columbine.

An online political newspaper named Polymic pulled his testimony from a senate meeting back in 2000, when the issue of gun laws were on the table. Whenever one of these tragedies occur, it seems like the hounds of politics come to tear their own agenda out of it, instead of trying to fix the problem before there are more victims, more victims to the add to the statistic.

And in all the debate of gun control or mental health it seems no one ever stops arguing enough to come a simple realization. Maybe it’s a puzzle with many pieces instead of just one.

The issue of using tragedy to promote causes is no more prevalent than in American politics.

In 2005, the Gulf Of Mexico and the city of New Orleans were decimated by Hurricane Katrina, which caused 150 billion dollars in damages. The politicians, safe and dry on Capitol Hill, saw,  as one news outlet put it, “A  giant laboratory for testing their competing domestic-policy agendas.”

The Democrats wanted more funding for the needy, and the Republicans wanted to ease the environmental laws. Each used the broken landscape of New Orleans as the battleground, and each showed their truly ugly and uncaring sides.

But while the problem at hand is big, it is a story that is played out over and over again all the days of our lives. We, as a culture, love a good success story, but the story of the fallen and down trodden captivates our interest far more.

We like to see others fail, and we love using others’ shortcomings in our own road to success. Whether or not its using someone else’s mistake to make your’s seem small and minimal or whether is using it to hide your fualts from the eyes of the world, everyone uses the bad in others lives as the springboard to their goal of the top.

From the seats on Capitols Hill, to the long and narrow halls of Westminster Christian Academy, the use of others’ heartbreak as fuel for our fire is prevalent. It doesn’t have to be a giant tragedy for our use of it to be tragic, and broken. It can be as small as one person or as big as Columbine. It’s wrong, but almost impossible not to fall into it’s trap.

We, as a community, can try to fix the problem by not gossiping. Gossip might be one of the biggest thing in spreading peoples tradegies and making them something they are not.

It might be for national agendas or it might even be to help others through their trying times, but deep down in the corner of our souls, and in the pit of our stomachs we know the true reason for the using of others misgivings. It is for us, and for our success, and our road to the top of the world. And as C.S. Lewis once said, “ We say a man is proud of being rich, or clever or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, cleverer, and more good-looking than others.”