My heart still hurts for the parents and families of the victims...while so many Americans have just pushed this to the side of their memories and moved on to other things - hey isn't honey boo-boo and her mom on soon? - these families are irrevocably torn and will never be whole again. I feel such a deep connection to them because there but for the grace of god go I...I have a 6-year old daughter (who turns seven this Saturday) and she is the light of my life. On top of being daddy's princess and one of the things I would gladly lay down my life for on this planet, she is also a first grader and the exact same age as the victims were. In her, I have a daily reminder of the victims and a constant recognition of the fact that while I was getting hugs and kisses at bedtime the other night, in Newtown there was a father or mother quietly crying while looking at the empty bed of their child, their princess, their light and reason to live. It still makes my eyes well with tears to think of it and how inhuman the whole thing is...
The horror of the way those children's lives ended, and their teachers and staff - as well as the trauma of the survivors that will go on and on without end is too much to bear if you stop to REALLY think about it. A room full of girls and boys, starting a school day before Christmas, laughing and playing and talking about Santa Claus and presents and parties and midnight masses and trips to grandma's house and other family traditions with their classmates...a teacher trying to get them to concentrate on their school lessons with so much anticipation that the kids can barely stand it, can't wait for the end of the week and the start of Christmas vacation...a staff pondering their need to finish shopping and holiday plans and knowing that the year was so close to over. And then in a flash, and an act of insanity none of us can or will ever understand,it was all gone.
Bullet riddled corpses with tear streaked faces, blood and brains litter the rooms and soak into the desks and floors. Bullet holes replace the push-pins on the map of the USA with everyone's vacation sites displayed. Broken glass and shredded wood are all that's left of a school desk and the window that minutes earlier a young child had been absent-mindedly gazed out. Dead bodies and sobbing survivors replace the soundtrack of Christmas forever in the minds of first responders and children in other rooms. Gun shot echoes and screams cut short with an abruptness and finality that are jarring to the soul are now the sleigh bells and jingles of many, too many. Terror hits the parents of the school and some receive a reprieve while others see their lives ripped into pieces that won't ever fit together again, missing entire sections of their will and reason to live, taken from them not by freak occurrence of nature or man-made accident or disease or anything remotely fathomable...snuffed out and brutalized in ways that forever scar a memory. Killed with the ruthless efficiency of a slaughter house bringing in a side of beef. Snuffed out with the callous disregard of assholes like Wayne LaPierre and others who see this as a political issue and as such can readily turn off their humanity and decency to suggest that the children would be alive only if we have MORE guns and higher capacity ammo.
I look at my daughter, hold her close and I am still stricken for the families of the dead and cannot help but think how destroyed I would be if the last time I ever got to see my little girl was in an autopsy room with bullet holes through her head and body and the knowledge that it was all for nothing. Those kids did nothing to the maniac shooter or his quack of a gun-nut mother. They paid the price for America's fetish with arms. I want REAL change in the wake of this tragedy. Nothing short of a total rethinking of the gun culture of this increasingly cesspool like nation.
If some mouth breathing kook came up to me in this situation and started spewing their hate and delusion of government staging EVERYTHING, yet being too incompetent to run ANYTHING, and started talking about these kids' deaths and the helplessness of their parents and siblings, grandparents and friends, aunts, uncles and neighbors being FAKED, I would swiftly deliver an open handed slap across their face and deal with the consequences later. I would only be sorry that I couldn't distill the anguish of the many and dump it squarely into the empty hearts of the callous few.
I have only two words for such people - FUCK YOU!
= new reply since forum marked as read
