In Memory

Along with the rest of America, we are in somber mourning today over the tragedy at a Connecticut elementary school yesterday. The news imagery of stunned five-year-old children being comforted by anguished adults is almost too painful even for distant onlookers to bear.  The Geezers all have children or grandchildren, and remember very well the wonder of children when they are four and five years old, just entering the world of education for the first time.

My wife and daughter work in elementary schools, and for them the week before Christmas will now be a time of little children needing reassurance that they won't be shot as they learn their first lessons. Except now we really can't  tell them it won't happen, only that it's not too likely.

And for us, anyway, the sorrow and shock are too fresh to even be joined by the appropriate outrage. That will have to wait a day or two, after the shock wears off just a little.

Our nation's inability to control the problems of gun proliferation, and our equal incompetence at dealing with the mental illness and/or evil that spawns such events, should be a cause for shame as we start to reflect in a day or two. Yes, such things happen elsewhere in the world, including places like Norway, renowned for peacefulness. But outside zones of war and terrorist turmoil, only in American has it now become routine for an event like this to happen monthly, even weekly.

We've heard it argued that this is the price of freedom—that you'd have to greatly curtail the liberty of everyone to protect ourselves fully from the evil/diseased individuals of the world. But I have to believe there is another, less bloody currency with which to pay the cost of freedom. I'd give up quite a bit if it would ensure no more five-year-old children were executed by psychopaths.

The outrage will come soon, but for now it's discouragement that reigns the day.