Thoughts on Newtown...

  Here we are again. This time it isn't a couple of wounded and two or three killed. It's dozens. Most of them babies of five or six years old. It is not an accident those children are dead. He targeted them. He. Targeted. Children. They weren't collateral damage. He killed exactly who he meant to.
  Predictably, we were not a full twenty-four hours out from this heinous atrocity before Facebook and Twitter were clogged with every possible and retread argument about how this could have been prevented. Calls for more gun control. Calls for less. Suggestions that teachers and principals should be armed. And, most curiously, the suggestion that this wouldn't have happened if God were "allowed" in schools. Basically, all the same old nonsense Red Herrings we hear and read about every time someone decides to kill a lot of people. It doesn't hold up this time, people. It just doesn't.
  The fact of the matter is there is nothing to be learned here. We cannot reason away this event or create a context in which we can be made to understand it. This is nothing short of absolute, undiluted, unfiltered evil, and your philosophical/ideological/religious opinions or theories do not in any way enter into this. What you see is what you get, and what you get is utter, black-hearted madness.
  Yes, after this there will no doubt be, at the very least, a robust argument in Washington about reinstating the assault-weapons ban that expired in 1994. Yes, there will probably be an attempt to draft up some symbolic piece of legislation seeking to improve mental health screenings for potential gun buyers or increased scrutiny to people applying for handgun permits, and so on and so forth. Those things may very well be good things that need to happen. This writer hopes those discussions happen. But none of it matters at all.
  It doesn't matter because there will still be twenty-six souls lost. Twenty of them the souls of babies whose parents will never see them graduate high school and go to college and give them grand-children. There is no piece of legislation or talk radio panel discussion that can make that right.
  In the end, the damage is done and it is irreparable. There is no coming back from this, and though only one finger was on the trigger, we all bear some of the responsibility for those victims. We bear the responsibility because we created the society that allowed it. No, we don't condone this, but we didn't stop it either. We are the society that created the circumstances which ultimately added up to twenty dead children and six dead adults who were tasked with the protection, instruction, and guidance of those babies.
  It is not an isolated event, but rather the culmination of a series of events in an American life. If any number of factors had been altered ever so slightly, we would not be where we are today, all of us with blood on our hands. We didn't pull the trigger, but we most certainly helped create the person who did. With our complacency. With our self-obsessiveness. With our cold indifference to our fellow man. We are none of us innocents.
  A butterfly flaps its wings in California, and a town in Connecticut will never, ever be the same. And neither will any of us. I wish I had more to say about this, but words fail me. I think I'll just wear this sadness like a cloak for a while. To be happy now feels unclean. God help us, if you're up there. God help America.