(Sandy Hook Principal Dawn Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, left, and School Psychologist Mary Sherlach. American Heroes.)
The horror at Sandy Hook- those innocent kids gunned down, the heroic ladies who ran toward certain death to protect them- is not going to go away. The other outrages of public gun violence seemed to fade with the passage of days.
The perpetrators of those serial outrages against humanity all melt into one another, from that asshole Charles Whitman on his Texas tower to the deranged young man with the orange hair in the theatre in Aurora, Colorado.
This sick little shit is something different. I am not going to use his name. His eyes are really disturbing in the surviving images: focused beyond us from some hell in which he resided. What does he say to us from the beyond the veil of death? Whatever it is, I do not want to hear it.
I was going to write something about the reason for the Second Amendment this morning, and had a long thoughtful commentary from my pal Boats about the way things work with an armed citizenry down in his neck of the woods. But you know what?
I can’t do it.
This is a society that is out of control. The reason that all those three hundred million guns are out there is that everyone is scared. Scared of something. We have been bludgeoned with the specter of so many disasters that it has become a reflex action. Fear. Flight or fight is the human reaction to fear, and there is no place to run.
Though I am looking. Accordingly, I am going to take a deep cleansing breath and do something different.
There is nothing that anyone can say that will prevent something fundamental changing in the way that Americans view their long relationship with the gun. It has been one of the fundamental foundations of the Republic.
Principal Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung ought to be commended in the same way that military folks are awarded the Congressional Medal for heroism in the face of certain death. I don’t know what the civilian equivalent might be- the Presidential Medal of Freedom? Whatever it is, she should be enshrined along with Mary Sherlach, the school psychologist, who was right there with Dawn, charging the gunman.
The human spirit is a remarkable thing. There is nothing that can be said that will either assuage the pain of this crime, nor to mitigate the loss.
The “why” of this monstrous crime is only tangential to the history of this Republic. The actions of a seriously disturbed and very young man were already crimes from the moment he rose that Friday and shot his mother to death in her bed.
The big debate that is starting is going to be about giving up freedoms that are dangerous. People are scared and they want to protect themselves. Then there are more guns. It is as logical as it is incredible in a civilized society.
From what I hear this morning, I think we are going to do something this time. I don’t know what it is, but here we go.
In the meantime, I will attempt to remember those sweet young faces, and the courage of the women who died trying to save them.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com