An Evil Action, and 28 Deaths
posted at 1:03 am
on Dec. 15, 2012
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Xmas Wish List 2012
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I want to write about the Connecticut elementary school shooting.
I don’t want to write about the Connecticut elementary school shooting. The one that saw 26 people, 20 of them children, dead at the hands of an insane gun-wielding nightmare of a man.
I don’t ever again want to write about an elementary school shooting, to think about one, to read about one, to have one happen, to see on Facebook that a friend’s friend’s niece was killed today by a bullet from a semiautomatic pistol.
I want to write something poignant. Something that will make people change their mind. To what, though? Who thinks this is okay? Who thinks this is “the price of freedom”? Who thinks this is “just what happens sometimes, in such a big country.” India’s a big country. This doesn’t happen there. Russia is a big country. This doesn’t happen there.
(Well, it does… but not by a single crazed gunman.)
I’m at a loss. We all are. We’ve all lost something, today.
What now? I’m emptied with grief, and filled with an aimless energy, a desire to do .. something. Something big, affirming, positive, healing.
Everyone I spoke to today mentioned this. Hug your kids, they said. Gun control, they said. Mental health treatments, that’s what we need.
I don’t disagree, but I think that what you respond with, in a case like this, is an opposite. You create. You volunteer. You reach out to your community, to people who might be .. isolated, alone, vulnerable. And you make sure they’re okay. Not because you want to keep an eye out for the next crazy man, but because it’s the right thing to do.
Because it brings light into the world. Because we fight evil by doing good, not just by fighting evil. Prevention and protection are good responses, but being a positive influence in the world is, by far, the best way to take the emotions stirred and shaken by an atrocity and to use the to power something that changes the world in a better way.
Into a world where I can write about something good on a Friday night, and not something that makes me wonder why the world exists.
