I hadn't added anything to my blog since March 26, 2012. The website was kind enough to remind me that when I finally logged back in, its own way of saying, "Hey. Yeah. Aren't you the writer? What the hell?" And I've planned on doing a series of wrap-up articles chronicling my year through movies, music, videogames, and failing at guitar. But then the Newtown tragedy occurred, and I spent the weekend thinking on what happened, and the horror of it, and what it means to me seeing as I work with kids in a school. It made me feel like my intended year-end blogging was frivolous.
Your year in music? Kids are dead. No one cares about your shit.
True or not, I still plan on writing those entries, but first I wanted to take a moment for the kids and the educators who lost their lives trying to protect them. Because they are what really matter. By reading this, you will find no answers, no solutions. At least I don't think you will, but let's face it, at this point I haven't even written the thing yet. What you will find are some brief thoughts, and maybe they run parallel to some thoughts that you've had. Or maybe they don't. It's a free country.
I saw the headline first as the events were unfolding. A shooting in an elementary school. My first thought was, "Probably just a fright because it's an elementary school. A small child with a gun could probably be stopped fairly easily." Then when I found out it was an adult, I thought, "Well, probably it was a crime of passion and only one adult was killed because of a jilted lover or something." Then I found out that twenty kids were killed, and the deliberateness of the event occurred to me. That's not a crime of passion.
My weekend was spent randomly processing what happened, until today I read an article on CNN that sort of put it into a perspective I could understand.
Here's a link to that article.
The article tells about a Newtown resident who crafted a small memorial that fits twenty candles, one for each child, and six candles, one for each teacher. I finally thought, Damn, twenty. That's a lot. Twenty kids are gone and all I can do is write what is sure to be one of thousands of blog posts about this event. And there's nothing I can do to help. Can I donate money? Food? I don't know.
One of the unspoken horrors about something like this is how helpless it makes us all feel. What I think we should remember, though, is that the world we live in is not radically different this morning that it was last Monday morning. Largely things are the same, but now we have another event, tragic though it was, that we can learn from as a society. People will champion different agendas because of this event, and what's right won't necessarily be sorted out. But don't worry, chances are you won't be shot when you go to work tomorrow. Chances are, most everyone you know is just as safe now as they were a week or two ago. There are no real answers to something like this, frustrating as that may be.
This shit? This kind of shit sucks. It's terrible. Don't forget that it happens. Keep an eye out as best you can, but don't like it own you. It happened here; it happens in other countries. It'll probably happen again. Whether we should look at guns or mental illness, I'll leave that up to you and Morgan Freeman.
But don't worry, because next week I'm gonna write about video games.
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