Hello, Readers. Welcome back to this week’s
installment. I have to confess that I
had plans this week to attempt to create an exceptionally witty post. I even had what I thought were a few creative
ideas with which to stimulate your collective fancies. Like the boxes of ornaments in the attic, I
planned to dust off a few of my usual Christmas-time jokes. Let’s see, there’s my seasonally updateable
“how do you get an elf pregnant” joke and my favorite holiday joke; you know,
the one where I show off my colored balls and put on my mistletoe belt
buckle.
Over the past few years I’ve
always written about what comes easily for me to write. I suppose a person could rightfully accuse me
of laziness in that regard. However, the
truth is that I am only capable of writing what comes easily for me to
write.
Normally, my hectic work schedule
and my just-as-busy personal life account for the gaps in between my
posts—particularly the off-season ones.
Many times, though, those gaps are created by what is commonly referred
to as writer’s block.
So what’s my point?
As a male well into his adulthood
few things either impress me or capture my attention anymore. In fact, that’s a big reason why it’s easy
for me to write about the inane content of The
Bachelor each week. As small
children we were all once enthralled to the point of uncontainable fascination
by the face of a parent simply popping out from behind the cover of a blanket
and declaring “peek-a-boo” before themselves dissolving into the same fit of
laughter on our toothless faces. Very
few, if any, things like that remain for us as adults. That’s why we bungee jump or take exotic
vacations, I suppose. Unfortunately—like
it or not—boredom is a consequence of experience.
Like most of you reading, last
Friday, December 14, began just about as normally and uneventfully as any other
day begins. I awoke, showered, dressed,
and headed to work. I left for my usual
lunchtime trip to the gym and deadened myself to my surroundings with the help
of the Pandora App on my iPhone and began to run. In front of the treadmills at my gym is a
long line of television sets, all of which are tuned to different stations so
as to maximize my overt attempt at sensory over saturation which, of course,
leads me inevitably to my Zen place until the pain in my knees and back jerks
me back into reality like that giant cane they used to use on the Vaudevillians.
Five minutes into my run I began
seeing the footage from the Sandy Hook Elementary School and as I read the
captions below the pictures I experienced a visceral reaction that I frankly
have not experienced since picking up the phone on September 11, 2001, and
hearing my father tell me that my two cousins (a New York Fireman and a New
York Policeman) were at Ground Zero.
I am sickened physically and
exhausted mentally over the gratuitous and unabated coverage of these
events. I am appalled by the
overwhelming speculation by reporters and various other talking heads. I am flabbergasted that children as young as
6 years old were interviewed at the site of the shootings and asked to recount
what they saw inside of the school. I am
horrified that the shooter was in a very real sense a child himself. I am angry
at the opportunism spawned by this event on both sides of the political
aisle. I am saddened beyond measure by
the death of the 7 adults, many of whom probably knew what fate awaited them
but nevertheless remained to face it in the name of protecting the children in
that school. But most of all, I am
devastated at the loss of the 20 children—all between 5 and 7 years old—who did
nothing but go to school that day.
In a way, I have no choice but to
write about this today. JP and Ashley’s wedding
special was a meaningless, ridiculous event prior to Friday. Today, it barely deserves acknowledgement.
So here we are. I’d like to share some of my thoughts about
the shootings. I’m sorry if many of you
came here looking for an escape from the coverage, the faces of those children,
and the immeasurable loss inflicted upon the parents and families of all of
those who died. If you’d like to stop
reading, I understand. Come back next week.
I’ll start—appropriately enough,
I think--with a book that is ironically required reading for school age
children.
“But while I was sitting
down, I saw something that drove me crazy. Somebody'd written 'fuck you' on the
wall. It drove me damn near crazy. I thought how Phoebe and all the other
little kids would see it, and how they'd wonder what the hell it meant, and
then finally some dirty kid would tell them— all cockeyed naturally— what it
meant, and how they'd all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a
couple of days. I kept wanting to kill whoever'd written it.” ― J.D. Salinger,
The Catcher
in the Rye
Salinger’s
protagonist, Holden Caulfield, himself obsessed with the idea of staying young
in order to preserve the time before he lost his innocence, knew through his
own experience that freedom from the world’s “fuck you’s” is a thing that
deserves to be prolonged as long as it can be prolonged—perhaps longer. Yet, Holden himself discovers that it is
impossible to prevent the children from running innocently through the
metaphorical rye and falling off the cliff.
From a
parent’s perspective, all a parent knows is the protection of his child. Inherent in every parent is Holden
Caulfield’s desire to keep his child safe.
Said another way:
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said:
If he is not the word of God God never spoke” --Cormac McCarthy, The Road
As “deep” as
that may strike you, I’m not certain it fits neatly into what happened at that
school last week. Those children—the
ones who died—died as innocent as the day they were born. They were not escapees running unwittingly and
unknowingly through the rye. They were
victims in the purest sense of the word and perhaps that is the most horrific
part of this entire “thing.”
“Nature
where everything comes from, nature where everything falls back,
leaves, nests,
soft branches that the air does not dare rustle,
don't make noise around this
tomb;
let the child sleep and the mother weep!” wrote Victor Hugo.
Indeed,
those mothers will be weeping for a long time.
What’s worse is the relentless media onslaught and the mind-numbing
political opportunism of the “gun control” and “mental health” advocates. What happened to civilized debate and respect
for the dead, I ask myself every time I turn on the television to see the
latest reactionary response or self-aggrandizing political speech about “doing
something” in the name of “our children.”
It’s obscene, really.
One
of my close friends is an Emergency Medicine doctor at the busiest high trauma
hospital here in Austin. I often meet
him for drinks or dinner and, in the right moment, he opens up about the
desensitization required in order for him to perform his job. He once told me that aside from being rarely
and momentarily bothered by “good people in bad situations” he is able to
completely remove himself emotionally from his work—with one exception.
“There
is nothing worse than telling parents they’ve lost their child,” he once said
before getting up from the table and immediately changing the subject upon his
return from the restroom. I suppose the
doctors and first responders who were forced by the sheer coincidence of being
scheduled to work during the hours of the shootings will carry the weight of carrying
out that horrific responsibility forever.
Look,
this blog is many things, but it’s never been political and it sure as hell is
not a vehicle for social statement. I
suppose this is as close as I’ll come before retreating into the safety,
stupidity, and ease of armchair quarterbacking a meaningless reality show
(please pardon the redundancy). If
you’ll humor me for a bit, however, I have a few more things to say. I promise to be brief.
First,
regardless of your personal stance on guns, the Second Amendment, mental
health, or any other hot button issue grabbed by whatever opponent and defended
by whatever advocate happened to pick up the phone when Nancy Grace or Bill
O’Reilly called, I think it’s worth noting (this, I confess, is the attorney in
me) that all of the facts of this crime are simply not known.
My
own opinion is that Mr. Lanza would have found a method and a means to do what
he did regardless of his access to firearms and ammunition. Picking up a gun in the heat of the moment is
one thing (ask Marvin Gaye’s father, for instance), but planning something like
this is another. The two largest attacks
on this country were perpetrated with fertilizer and box cutters and both were
planned for years. I suspect
(unfortunately) that regardless of the outcome of this particular series of
events, others will inevitably follow.
On
a side note, I waited until after December 21 to post this just in case the
world ended like the Mayans predicted.
It struck me after midnight on that day that if the Mayans were smart
enough to predict the end of the world then there would still be Mayans. Back to my rant.
Still,
I understand that basic human need to “do something” rather than wallow in the
realization that we are all, in a real sense of the word, helpless to prevent
these sorts of things from happening. I
suspect that’s what’s really going on in the minds of those holding signs in
front of buildings or hurling profanities at other temporarily insane, just as
passionate people on the other side of the street. It’s difficult to have an open mind when
something like this happens.
Unfortunately, that’s the only way to reach any semblance of a solution.
Likewise,
I’ve seen a mountain of articles, interviews, and blog posts (I’ve been
interested in this quite a bit) declaring that God was (or wasn’t) there or
that He caused (or didn’t cause) the deaths of the children or, in the
alternative, that he permitted this to happen.
I’ve read that gay marriage and abortion law are the cause of this and
that the taking of innocent children is God’s way of getting our
attention.
My
response to all of that is (again, this is the lawyer in me speaking) is that
it is impossible to know the mind of another person much less the Creator of
the entire Universe. Any attempt to
espouse His real intent, involvement, indeed, even his presence at the event,
is simply speculation on our part. We’d
all do better to believe quietly what we believe and to simply yet deliberately
put those into action. The parents,
siblings, grandparents, family members, and friends who lost someone in that
school need help not a lesson.
I’d
like to end this by reminding all of you that Christmas is upon us. Whether that’s a secular holiday or the most
important religious holiday of the year for you, it’s a time when the world
tends to slow down long enough for us to reflect on the goodness in all of
us. Even during the worst time in my
life when I was marred by cynicism (and a few other –isms) there was something
about seeing the Christmas lights along the neighborhood streets or coming home
to turn on the television to see the Peanuts gang singing Silent Night around
that famous Charlie Brown Christmas tree that always made me smile. Keep that in mind for me, would you?
Shakespeare
wrote about the loss of a child in the last act of Hamlet.
Your cause of sorrow
Must not be measured by his worth, for then
It hath no end
Let’s
all hope that an end eventually comes to the abject suffering of the survivors
of the Sandy Hook shootings. If not,
let’s hope they all find enough peace to live their lives. In spite of the miss of the Mayans, I doubt
there is enough time left in the lives of the survivors with which to make true
peace. Perhaps some meaning will come of
all of this.
However,
in the likely event that meaning refuses to show its face, let’s all take the
time to notice a child and to appreciate the laughter and the smiles that
radiate from within them. Let us all
take an extra second to notice the look on their faces when they open “Santa’s”
gifts and may we all laugh hysterically at the icing on their Christmas
cookie-filled faces---all the while appreciating the fact that those priceless
gifts were stolen from 26 sets of parents on December 14th, 2012,
for absolutely no reason at all.
Jane Austen wrote, “If
I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
For now, I will talk about it no more.
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New
Year. Be safe. I’ll see you back here in January. DP
