For me, what hit me was the fire station scene. There were parents hugging their kids as they found them. Then those were those parents looking for children who would never run up to them. Children that they would never hold again. I think on that. Those parents will never fix a breakfast for those kids again. They will never rush them to practice. They will not put out Santa for them. They will not see those kids off to their proms or their graduation. That evil man with that gun in a moment robbed those parents of that and robbed those little children of all that they could be. It was pure evil.
As a man of Faith, I take some comfort in knowing that those children are with Christ now. But, I also think about how Christ told us "do this unto the least of my Kingdom and you and have done it unto me." Preachers on the past Sunday gave solid sermons about why God allows such things to happen. I look at it another way. I see God, saying to us, "I gave you free will, why did you let this happen?"
It is that question that haunts me. Keeps me up at night. Now there are politicians who argue it is all about guns. That is the easy discussion. Blaming such things on a inhuman thing like a gun is easy and simple and well, wrong. The evil man who did the act had guns, true, but the guns he used were not legally his. There were laws already in place that forbade him from having the guns he used.
That begs bigger questions and a tougher discussion. It starts with this culture we live in. It is device driven. So many of us do not talk to one another, learn about one another, we just facebook and tweet. It is an impersonal world we have created with technology. Our youth are even more immersed in the impersonal. Things are said and done online in social networks that we would never do in person and life itself just seems to be a name on a device. Not a living human being. Not someone to understand. Not someone to respect. Just a name on a device.
Add to that the incredibly violent video games so many of our youth get lost in. It is not like playing war with other kids outside at the play fort anymore. Its all on the video screen, and a killshot gets you points and success. No suffering you see. No humanity. Just a game with points to score. A soul lost in that world has no sense of humanity. And, so many of us not only let it happen, we buy the games for our youth.
That brings to mind other issues, like how we deal with mental illnesses and how drugged up we all are. The mentally ill are people we just find a "magic" pill for, not work with them to deal with their problems. Once we give them the magic pills, we isolate them usually. We say, "hey they have their meds."
And, when it comes to meds, we all love them as a society. We condemn the man who might smoke a joint or take a drink, but we love the prescribed drugs. If your kid is too hyper, we got a drug for that. If you feel down this week, take a pill. Big drug companies make big money making sure you and yours are medicated to a state where you can not tell good from bad, because hey that is judgmental, just take a pill.
So many of us and our kids are so addicted to the prescribed pills that when something like Newtown happens, we demand a tool like guns be dealt with. Do not dare touch our culture of technology and drugs that combines to make us so inhuman. I say balderdash with that. It is time we did the real work of being human. Lets talk to one another for real. Let our youth go out and play and interact with others. Lets deal with problems for real. Do the work. Say no to the magic pills marketed to us. Let this tragedy forge us to work to be human beings again, and have a culture in which human beings touch other human beings and work out problems instead of hiding behind pills and blaming some tool.
May God be with the victims of Connecticut and have mercy on us all for the culture we created.
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