It's Been Three Years Since Andrew Breitbart Left Us

Twitchy noted this sad anniversary over the weekend.

Jim Geraghty won the ACU's Journalist of the Year Award on Friday, and has posted about what he would have liked to have said, had he more advanced warning that he'd be winning something and should prepare a speech for it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Andrew Breitbart lately. It was three years ago he addressed this conference for the last time. People look back and I see him described as this angry guy, a fighter – he titled his autobiography "Righteous Indignation." I wouldn’t claim to be his best friend or to have known him well, but I don't think he’s given enough credit for being a man who was really driven by love.

That may sound kind of sappy or like it belongs on a Hallmark card, but he demonstrated an amazing kindness and generosity of spirit to those around him.

The day Andrew died, it seemed like everyone on my Facebook page posted a picture that they had taken with him. For a guy who was always on the go, he rarely if ever seemed like he didn’t have time for other people. So many people offered their tale of meeting him at a conference or gathering, getting to talk to him for ten minutes or so, and walking away from that conversation feeling like for that ten minutes, they were the most important person in the room. A lot of his fans, friends, and contributors to his site offer some version of the same story, meeting Breitbart and sharing a news tip and then being told by him, "that is a really good story idea, and you're the one who should write it." That’s what happened to my friend Kurt Schlichter, and there are so many people who got into writing or journalism because instead of holding onto a scoop or an idea for himself, Andrew told them they could do it. You don't treat people with such enthusiastic encouragement if you don’t have a lot of love for people.

I've mentioned this before, but Andrew's death kind of woke me up to thinking seriously about both Life and Death. 90% of the reason I post about health-related issues is because of Andrew's death -- he was the first contemporary of mine to die. When you're young, you really do think you're sort of Immortal, or at least you never think about mortality at all (which makes you a passive, ignorant believer in your own mortality).

Then one day a great big Surfing Bear of a man dies at a young age and you start thinking about it a lot.

But the fact that Andrew died young is just happenstance; that says little about him. The other thing his death forced me to think about was Life. There's no point fearing death if you're not loving life.

And Andrew's death forced me to confront the different ways we were living life -- to wit, he was and I wasn't. He was really alive, just excited and plugged in and enthusiastic and brave, so g**damned brave about everything.

I'm not really doing a terrific job of Living Each Day As If I Were Andrew Breitbart, but I am trying, here and there, to engage more with Actual Life and not treat it as something to be avoided.

posted by Ace at 03:51 PM

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