Monsters from the ID!
Early yesterday morning, the first anniversary of the Newtown massacre, we once again watched the classic 1953 film “Forbidden Planet”. In this science fiction movie, a crew is dispatched to a planet where another group had set down some twenty years before. When the relief crew got there they found only one of the original crew left alive who had constructed a life for himself and his shapely daughter based on knowledge that he had acquired from an ancient people long dead called the Krell. To make a long story short, these long dead people had been killed by monsters that had come from their own subconscious, a fact discovered by the relief crews doctor just before he died.
We suppose that is as good an explanation for the really unfathomable and unexplainable things that went on in Newtown, Connecticut just a year ago yesterday. It is instinctive for the human mind to try to place some rationality on events that are so horrific that they cannot really be rationally explained. Why would a young man named Adam Lanza go into his former school and kill twenty six souls, twenty of them so innocent that they had not yet reached any age of accountability. To cut down a six year old child with a weapon of mass destruction is an incomprehensible thing. To destroy twenty of them is beyond any reasonable level of comprehension.
So we shrug our shoulders in the face of such a thing and pass it off as simply the actions of a madman without really looking into it any further to see if we can construct any rational way that it could have happened. We do not look further because we might be looking at ourselves placed in some sort of an impossible situation in which cold death rules our soul. To see another human being destroy twenty young lives further stretches our reality to a point that we simply cannot comprehend. But what previously was not possible is now not only possible but a reality that could happen again. When general Eisenhower saw the death camps at the end of World War Two in Germany and its satellites, he made sure that as many allied soldiers as were possible were sent through those camps so that the reality of them could not be denied, the gross horror of it was so terrible. There have been no photographs released from Newtown possibly out of respect for those who lost loved ones there. But one grieving mother had her son’s corpse open for viewing at his wake with a cloth over a part of his face so that those who came would know first hand the horror of his death.
We cannot really escape real life horrors. We can only try, like the proverbial ostrich, to hide our heads in the sand as a way to try to escape from them. But, like that ostrich, we leave so much exposed to whatever comes along when we do that sort of thing.
There is a real life horror among us today and it is the fact that the National Rifle Association was more than successful in its bid to make sure that there was no meaningful gun legislation passed in the wake of what happened in Newtown just one year ago yesterday. Wayne Lapiere and his “organization” convinced enough legislators and others that we needed more guns to combat those who were “bad men with guns” that they bought into the idea that, as in so many other things, no regulation was needed at all. What Lapiere thinks is that we need armed guards patrolling our school halls to prevent any further badness from erupting. But does he want to pay these people or train them well enough to oppose some future bad man without getting themselves killed along with others. In a word: No! And has he confronted the idea that one of these armed NRA “soldiers” might turn on another classroom full of the innocent and be the next Adam Lanza? In another world: No! And, if it happens, what will he say then?
It is the role of government to protect its citizens from things that they cannot protect themselves from. It is as simple as that. When government becomes the tool of those who do not really care about its citizenry then we are already more than half way down the road to something as horrible as what Hitler did in the camps back in Europe so many years ago. We already see those in this government who legislate to take the simple right of adequate nutrition away from school children and those who cannot, for one reason or another, feed themselves or their families adequately. And we see these same people legislating to take away some basic supports from those who were devastated by what the past administration did with its cruel and short sighted policies.
When we look at some of the collective atrocities that have been carried out across the twentieth century and already in this new century, we need to look back on our own close shave that occurred during the period after 1929. When Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office he stated to a friend that if he were not successful he might be the last American president. As we look back on that statement we wonder how close we might have really come to having the atrocities of Germany happening here. And, as we look forward with the knowledge of some of the statements that some in this government and surrounding it are making today about those less fortunate and innocent, we wonder just how close we may be to recreating a horrible past right here in our own midst.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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