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I have two daughters, both married with children. I was raised as an only child, both of my brothers being much older and away at school. Starting with those two facts, I conclude that an only child is uniquely close to his/her parents, and that if either of my daughters (who have normal human sensibilities) had been an only child, and heard such a story from their in-laws personally, that's the way they would react to the man who caused the death of that other daughter and only child. Logic as well as facts have their place in any article, as long as the logic is not skewed by bias.

Some folks here don't seem to have read that you wrote the OTHER reason--i.e. aside from the obvious.

And yet, reading your above explanation has moved me into the other camp, I'm afraid--please don't take this as another of the hysterical rants on this thread.

You have made a fatal error, as you explained above.

You have taken YOUR personal experience and decided "That's how MY family would react, so logic dictates that's how EVERY family like mine would react."

Your article is thus a theoretical one. You don't know that this is how things went in their family.

My brothers know, for years, people in our old town I have never once met. By most people's logic, if X knew my brother for twenty years, one would say "Oh, Darkwolf377 knows X, he's best friends with his brother!"

That is assumption. It is not a fact, because it wasn't verified.

Someone could also say "DW knows his mom's next door neighbor, they've lived next to her for ten years!" But...I've never met them.

I'm sorry, I respect your THEORY, but that is all it is.

You need to rework this piece. Maybe as a "what if?"

Unless you know, from the players involved--the Alitos or those they have directly told this to--that one of the reasons she was crying was because she was thinking of her husband's family's friends (as likely as it may SEEM), you are merely pushing a fiction.

No, I didn't say that Mrs. Alito must have reacted that way because my family would have reacted that way. I said that a daughter and only child "with normal sensibilities" would react that way. And if you read the original NYTimes article, you'll see that it spends a considerable part of its major length, taking about Mrs. Alito's upbringing and sensibilities. She is a normal woman, in that regard.

I did not, of course, rely on one source for that, either. I read several mini-bios of Mrs. Alito, and they agree on this point.

John / Billybob