Today is the day after my 54th birthday. It was the end of a stressful and busy week at work. I routinely check the news on the internet. By 11AM I had a chance to do that before I made a quick trip to the mall at lunch to do some Christmas shopping.
TWENTY CHILDREN WERE DEAD. WTF? Really?
I'm childfree by choice but I do have tons of kids in my life. My friends have kids, some of THOSE kids even have kids. My next door neighbors have a kid who will be 5 in a few months. We love that kid. We love our neighbors. I wave to the little guy every morning on his way out to school with his dad. R's backpack is usually hanging jauntily off his back and he waves to me as they head out. In the evening I'm usually getting home from work and letting the dogs out when R and his dad are on their way in. We wave, sometimes R has something to tell me and he runs over to the fence before he goes inside.
Little kids like him were killed today. I don't know why. I hate it. I hate guns.
My heart can't help but try to understand what those parents are feeling. It's 11 days before Christmas. I'm sure that they had most of their Christmas shopping done. They had presents stashed all over the place, they were hoping that the kid liked it or that it fit. It's one of the last days of Hannakuh, was there some little kid excited to go home and light another candle with his or her family tonight and get another gift to continue to memorialize the 8 nights the lamps burned bright?
I can't help but think of all the kids in my life. My friend Ei's grandkids. She has many. I just saw an adorable picture on facebook of her youngest grandbaby, she'll be a year old soon, wearing an awesome Winter ensemble as she strolled the streets of NYC with her parents. She's only been with us for a year but I couldn't imagine her being taken away…not like that.
There are a lot of people asking us to pray. Pray for the souls of these angels, pray for the souls of the adults and pray for the soul of the killer. Pray to whom? I want a God that I don't have to pray to when something like this happens, where was this God WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING? Before it happened? Where was this God to stop the killer?
I believe in a deeply spiritual place. Something that exists in SOME OR MOST of us that is good and honest and spiritual. But who is this God that allows 20 little kids to die today? 20 little kids who were looking forward to Christmas, 20 little kids who recently sat on Santa's knee and whispered their deepest desire for whatever is currently the equivalent of a Red Rider BB Gun.
My heart breaks tonight for those families, all of them, not just the ones who lost their babies today but the ones whose babies had to be told to close their eyes so they didn't see bad things as they were led to safety and their waiting families.
Love hurts, it always hurts, even when it's happy and good it hurts in the anticipation of loss, today's losses were inconceivable. This needs to stop. It needs to stop NOW.
That 2nd amendment that the NRA is so fond of is about bearing arms as a MILITIA, a military fighting unit when there is none, it doesn't mean that we can have semi-automatic assault weapons. Might I add, the founding father had no idea how good we'd become at inventing efficient killing machines that would bear the name "guns" same as their old, slow muskets.
Please hug your loved ones tonight and I don't care if your loved one is your spouse, your kid, your dog or your turtle, hug 'em, love 'em and feel free to be angry; we've all been stripped of something tonight, some more than others but we've all lost something and I'm fucking PISSED.
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