bonar crump

bonar crump
husband - father - reader - runner - picker - grinner - lover - sinner

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Newtown


All of you out there who've made the Newtown, CT massacre about YOU should be ashamed of yourselves. From political agendas to unscrupulously subjective rantings about how God has abandoned our secular school system, please shut the fuck up.

Now is a time for mourning. Now is a time for sorrow. Now is a time for contemplation and resolve. Now is a time for grasping one another’s hands and quietly acknowledging that there will be families with presents under their trees this year which were meant to go to children that are no longer with us. It is incomprehensible. And, yet, it is survivable. Somehow, the worst victims of tragedy get better. Somehow, we always seem to heal. Somehow, we eventually accept these tragedies as a part of our new and future reality.

I’m not trying to teach anyone anything by writing these words. I’m just trying to stir it around and mix it in with the rest of my daily food so that maybe it can be palatable enough for me to gulp down. I’m too pissed off not to try to get this down the hatch so I can move forward. I’m pissed at every one of us—every one of our leaders—every one of our schools—every one of our families—and I resent the implication that ANY OF US knows a fucking thing about why this happened.

I resent the implication that ANY OF US understand anything at all about the list of massacres in each of the US States since the early 1800’s. 40 of our 50 States have experienced multiple instances of reckless, unconscionable waste of human life that NONE OF US can wrap our brains or hearts around.

If you really want to explain something to me then try making me understand why all of the malicious, malevolent, cowardly acts of mass homicide within my lifetime have been perpetrated by white men ages 20-35. You know what? Forget I even mentioned it because someone out there will actually try to answer the question. They’ll try to apply a logical answer to a systemic morphing psychological virus of predation.

News flash: seeking a purpose for everything and insisting on defining, labeling, and cataloging unimaginable chaos, depravity, and cowardice leads to a net gain of squat—nada—zilch. We have to wrestle with the reality that another white male between the ages of 20-35 will do this kind of thing again. We have to prepare ourselves for the inevitability that somewhere within our midst is more than one white man contemplating a way to “up the wager” and hurt us even more.

I am allowing myself the next 24 hours to continue visualizing these children screaming out and huddling in fetal positions as a white male stands over them and puts the barrel of a semi-automatic weapon right up to their terror-stricken faces and pulls the trigger. I think it’s important to burn that image in my mind. I think it’s important, somehow, in the sharing of grief and mourning and lamentations. But enough is enough. After the next 24 hours I’ve got to move forward. I’ve got to find the next level of grief. I’ve got to make up my mind that I will not be weakened or rendered motionless by my sorrow.

I’m going to add this experience to the collection of other tragic experiences I’ve witnessed and lived through, and I’m gonna keep sifting through the pile looking for ways to use these negative experiences for something positive. I’m gonna think about ways I can be more involved in the lives of abused children. I’m gonna think about the ways I can watch for troubled white men and bring them closer to me instead of pushing them farther away. I’m gonna take more responsibility for the fatherless and the widowed and the poor and the sick and the imprisoned. I’m gonna use these experiences to fortify my resolve that THIS CAN ALL WORK SOMEHOW.

Tragedy is supposed to evoke a heroic struggle instead of a wave of talking heads and brooding Facebookers relishing the opportunity to scream out their opinions yet again. The heroic struggle isn’t against legislation or hate groups. The heroic struggle is NOT any sort of monolithic idea or policy or attitude. The heroic struggle is a mosaic of hearts and hands and efforts and backgrounds and ideas all coming together to form a unified front of protection from the imminent threat of tragedy next time. There’s always a next time. And if next time isn’t met with cooperation instead of sanctimonious ideological segregation, then more children and teachers die.

And if that happens, we’ve all failed once again.