The Twenty!
There were twenty small children killed yesterday and I just don’t have any real heartfelt feelings about it and I don’t like feeling that way! I went to bed early just to avoid the news and could only sleep four hours or so as I woke up thinking about those twenty kids up in Connecticut.
What are all of those parents going to do with all of those presents that they bought for a Christmas now lost? My father saw his mother die on Christmas eve back in 1958 and he spent the rest of his life sad and depressed around that time of year as he remembered a woman who had a full life who simply decided to die on that day.
Christmas is forever lost to all of those who had a child die in that school!
This is the season of advent when the Christian world awaits the birth of a savior. All we can say to the parents of those twenty is simply that the Lord God above has not asked them to do anything that he has not been through himself as he gave his only begotten son so that they might have everlasting life. But, oh my God, these children never even had the chance to have a life at all. They were just at the beginning of a life that, as President Obama so eloquently said, would include birthdays and graduations and children of their own.
My grandparents on my mothers side lost a child around Christmas back in 1937 and they never allowed a Christmas tree or any mention of Christmas in their house again for the rest of their lives. The child was only four when it died!
Twenty children died yesterday and we cannot begin to imagine what they went through as they watched in apparent shock and horror as their friends died before them as they awaited their turn to go. Most people in this world never, thankfully, get to experience anything like that at any age. Did they get to look into the eyes of a disturbed monster before they died? There was obviously no sympathy for them as they looked into the eyes of death. The only thing that I have to equate to what they might have remotely felt were my feelings back in 1954 when I found out that an employee of my father had killed a woman and was on the run in our small town down in southern Illinois. He was black and I can also remember the feelings that I had when I found out that the some of the towns adult men had gathered together and gone and burned down the black community and run all of its inhabitants off. If I can remember that to this day, what are children in that school going to remember when the haunting sound of gunshots wakes them from a sound sleep in the course of a lifetime nightmare that is reoccurring and will only stop when they make their own final passage from this life. You are never too young to remember something like that, and, as President Obama said, their childhood innocence has been taken away from them forever.
Children are so sweet and even when they are not sweet they really are! A child ten or under still has some innocence about them and that is such a precious, precious thing in a world that is basically not innocent of much of anything anymore.
Those twenty will never get the chance to go to Disney World or watch Sesame Street anymore!
When Timothy McVey blew up that federal building down in Oklahoma City back in 1995, we found out that he used a fertilizer bomb and we have restricted access to fertilizer ever since that time. When we go to the drug store, some over the counter drugs are kept behind the counter because we know that they can be mixed with other things to create something harmful to us all. As we confront Syria today, we are concerned about weapons of mass destruction and we are preparing for the time when we will have to secure each and every one of them. They are chemical in nature and they do harm to the body. How many have died in this past year in the United States by the almost unrestricted right to own weapons that the founding fathers never thought about when they wrote the second amendment to the constitution of the United States? Isn’t there some sort of mass destruction in all of that?
Doesn’t it say somewhere in one of our founding documents that people have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” What pursuit do these dead children have now and what future do their parents and loved ones have left to them today?
What do we say to a child who says when he learns of the death of a friend that “I have no one to play with now!”
We are not engaged in play when we confront the issue of guns and the disturbed individuals who get access to them and do the tings that they do! Tom Fuentes, a former F.B.I. official and CNN contributor stated yesterday that this carnage will continue because by the time we get to the bottom of this event and reach some conclusions about it we will no longer care that it happened any longer and the same circular firing line will continue on and on and on and on! And now, the copycats will have a new rich, fertile field to exploit: our elementary schools and their children!
We hope that some magazine such at, perhaps Time or Newsweek, will run a cover with the pictures of the twenty school children that have been killed lined up in rows of five across on its cover. We remember when general Eisenhower toured the concentration camps at the close of World War Two and decided to order as many allied troops to take a tour of those camps as possible so that what happened there could never be forgotten or denied. We recently saw the film “Lincoln” that included a scene where president Lincoln rides a horse at the head of a union column of troops through a field of the dead from one of the last battles of the Civil War. The frozen expressions of horror on some of the dead soldiers faces tells a story all of its own. Perhaps stills or even video of the scene inside those Connecticut classrooms should be released so that anyone who can stand to look at them gets that chance.
We once had a book in our personal library titled “Don’t Shoot, We are your children.” It was written in the wake of the Kent State tragedy where national guardsmen shot dead several college students protesting the Vietnam war back around 1970. They are shooting now and these are not their children because those doing the shooting are children of the proverbial lesser god, or, more precisely, the children of pure evil unleashed.
Well! Its one o’clock in the morning and we’ve written twelve hundred words and maybe that will buy us a rest of the nights sleep! Maybe! Maybe not!
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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