Just A Pause

Before I continue with the awesome Christmas Countdown and everything silly and light hearted, I need to take a pause. A pause to express something. Anything. Yesterday was a day that can not be fathomed by even the most depraved. A day that left us all not asking why did this happen but why did God let this happen. We are all too familiar with the crazed individual or evil agenda of an ideology that preys on the helpless while the brave and strong can only react after the horror has happened. We turn on the television and feel sick when the aerial helicopter streams video of “breaking news” as we watch the roof and parking lot of a school, police entering as lines of kids with their arms up exit. It’s a society that can say, “it looks like another school shooting”. Yesterday was no different but yet it was.

At 9:30 on a chilly and clear Friday morning in a Connecticut elementary school, a heavily armed gunman entered the building as morning announcements were being read. He proceeded to shoot the principal and vice principal, school nurse and administrator with the announcement intercom still on. Then he proceeded to a kindergarten class where he massacred twenty children including the teacher before killing himself. That is what happened. That is what happened and there is nothing we can do about it.

I watched this story unfold from the very beginning when it seemed the lack of urgency with the ambulances and use of the triage tent naively symbolized the worst is over. Later on we learned that the horror had already happened and what those police and fireman walked into…I can’t. I can’t because my brain isn’t wired that way to process such true horror. As I type this some twenty hours after the massacre the little bodies are still in there as every bullet casing is found and little shoe is counted.

So, I would pray but in my tiny world this crosses the line. When the most innocent are butchered and we have to watch the parents rush to a school, who just hours before kissed their little ones awake and saw them off with backpacks too big on their tiny frames, bed-headed and excited for Christmas, they had to learn their babies were lost at the hand of pure evil. I can’t pray right now. But I can demand a change.

See that? I carried that rifle for six years in the Army and it is designed for one purpose: killing. The bullet is a 5.56mm and travels at approximately 841 meters per second. When it penetrates a human body is tumbles and ricochet, shattering bones and turning organs to mush. It’s an evil weapon but an effective one when you want to win in a COMBAT environment. This was the weapon the gunman used against those children…babies.

I don’t know why I feel the need to write this. I guess the juxtapose between the M-4 rifle and a kindergarten class makes it clear in my simplistic mind. Things have to change.

Now I sit here at 7:30am on a Saturday in a Starbucks, watching a mother and her two little kids go over a Christmas list for dad before they head out to for a day of holiday fun. It makes me smile but all I can think about is the presents under the parent’s tree for the little babies who were massacred, never to be opened. It’s too much sometimes.