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2020-11-05
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The Beauty of Bright Sunny Days

Summary:

Written in the aftermath of the tragedy at Newtown, Connecticut as a way to pay tribute to all those lost and all those that survive.

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THE BEAUTY OF BRIGHT SUNNY DAYS

(C)December, 2012

Friday, December 14, 2012 was a bright sunny day, so charming and innocent and full of promise for the coming weekend, the second-to-last one left before the Christmas holiday. Maybe plans for getting the family Christmas tree were made or there was some baking or shopping to get done, or maybe a visit to Santa was in store so that those who still believed in him could whisper what they wanted for presents. For 27 families, the morning started off a normal one…breakfast was eaten, backpacks readied for school, goodbye hugs and "I love you" kisses were given as 20 sets of parents saw their kids off to school in Newtown, Connecticut. And once the school bell rang at Sandy Hook Elementary, teachers greeted their students as they filed into classrooms, urging their young charges to take their seats so that they could begin their day of fun and learning.

And then Hell hit the school in the form of a young man toting an assault rifle and a pair of handguns, shooting out a window to gain access to the building, storming a set of classrooms full of first graders…

And leaving so much tragedy, so much sorrow, so much devastation and unanswered questions in his wake…

Including the big question of "why?"

All within just minutes on that beautiful and bright sunny day.

Just like on 9/11, just like at Oklahoma City, just like at Columbine, just like at Pearl Harbor, just like at Dallas in 1963.

And there is something so ironically perverse about it, for it should be written somewhere that such heartbreaking tragedies must always strike when it is storming out, the heavens tossing surly black clouds that weep down torrent-tears of rain, the wind a devil-driven tempest that howls and lashes at us in fury, the very air angry and turbulent with the violence that is about to hit…

Because Hell shouldn't happen on a bright sunny day.

But yet…

It did.

And our innocence…that jaded, battered, shredded innocence that has been mended and torn so many times like a battle flag on a field of war…it will be ripped once again, the threads unraveling in horror once more at the next massacre.

And the next.

And the next.

Massacre. It's such a strange term, sounding so benign for something so atrocious. It evokes thoughts of battlefields, of war-torn countries, not of malls or movie theaters or schoolrooms run red with the blood of innocents.

And where is it written that we must offer up that innocent blood as a sacrifice to someone's evil? When I was a kid, school shootings…actually massacres in general…were anomalies, odd little blips of craziness on the radar of normalcy, yet in the ten years after I graduated high school in 1989, there were at least 14 school shootings, including Columbine. And like in the aftermath of those mass killings, we struggle to find something to blame it on…it was the violent video games, the violent movies, the violent music. They were inspired by a book, they had mental health issues that were not properly addressed, they had abusive childhoods and lax parents, they were on drugs. They hated the world, they were in love or out of love or weren't loved at all, they had horrible families and even worse jobs, or no jobs at all. They were flat broke, they were spoiled rotten rich, they were middle class boring and looking to express themselves. They were bullied, they were popular, they were angry, they were depressed, they were psychopaths desensitized by modern culture.

Yet no matter what, the reasons still defy explanation, for we can never truly know what sets those kinds of people off, what it is that trips that fine wire inside of them so that they explode into a fury of hatred that drives them to grab up a gun or plant a bomb and kill their fellow humans.

And what's scarier is we know it will happen again and again and again…in big cities and small cities, in rural areas and urban sprawls; on the East Coast and the West Coast and all the states in-between, not to mention in other countries. It happens in malls, in restaurants, in movie theaters, in supermarkets, in churches, in workplaces…

And it will happen again in schools.

Because no matter how strict you make gun control laws or how tight you make security in our schools, if evil wants to invade and attack, it will find a way in. Guns, knives, bombs…hell, in 1927 in Bath Township, Michigan, a man named Andrew Kehoe was upset that his property taxes had been raised in order to pay for improvements to the school building, so he decided to blow it up, and he did, on the morning of May 18th, killing 37 children and 7 adults, including himself. It still ranks as the worst school massacre in American history and the third worst non-military massacre on American soil, right behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Oklahoma City bombing.

And we are not stupid or naïve, we know that there will always be evil out there that has a need to rack up an even higher body count than the previous mass killer…in 1984, James Oliver Huberty of San Ysidro, California, took out 21 at the local McDonald's, beating Charles Whitman's 1966 count of 16 at the University of Texas in Austin; in 1991, George Hennard took out 23 at the Luby's Restaurant in Killeen, Texas before Seung-Hui Cho beat that body count in 2007 with 32 students murdered at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. And now, Adam Lanza has killed 27 innocent people, 20 of them young children, in Newtown, Connecticut.

So we add that town to the list of the other towns that are now seared into our consciousness with sickened horror and sharp-edged grief, the names of them all places of fearsome hellish dragons and the brave heroes who try to slay them, and always struck through with that innocent blood…Bath Township, Michigan; Austin, Texas; Iowa City, Iowa; West Paducah, Kentucky; Pearl, Mississippi; Springfield, Oregon; Jonesboro, Arkansas; Red Lake, Minnesota; Blacksburg, Virginia; Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania; Dunblane, Scotland…

And the biggie: Columbine.

Columbine was the defining moment, the names Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold quickly becoming synonymous with evil, and really, what wasn't evil about them? What wasn't gut-wrenchingly horrifying about the way they methodically stalked their terrified classmates, taunting them and laughing at their fear before they killed them, throwing pipe bombs and shooting at the propane bombs they'd planted in hopes of detonating them so they'd kill the first responders rushing to the scene? And who wasn't stunned into disbelief and sickened by the images that came out of Columbine…of Danny Rorbaugh lying dead on the sidewalk outside the school, just yards from a parked car where a police officer and students huddled for cover, his blood staining the pavement; of the screaming, frightened students fleeing across the campus with their hands atop their heads; of the students holding up a sign begging for help in the window of the science classroom where teacher Dave Sanders lay bleeding to death; of severely wounded Patrick Ireland being plucked from the shattered window of the library, his body falling limply to the SWAT truck beneath him, a bloody swath left on the glass behind him; of the grainy security camera footage that showed Harris and Klebold outfitted for the war they waged against their fellow students, wearing military harnesses and ammo belts, their rifles in hand as they casually crossed the cafeteria several times, taking time out from their mayhem to take swigs of pop from the cups left behind when everyone fled. Their cool complacency and outright giddy joy they seemed to take in the destruction and death they were dealing out was chilling as hell to think that anyone, let alone a teenager, could be that cold-blooded and callous to actually seem to love killing their fellow human beings.

And whose heart didn't break at the sight of those frantic, frightened kids and their equally frantic and frightened parents being reunited at the elementary school where they'd all been bussed, and by nightfall, after the school had been cleared and secured, the parents of twelve of those students knew that they had sent their child safely off to school that morning…

And they were not coming home. Not that night, not ever.

As a nation, we couldn't imagine it, couldn't imagine what it must be like to have to bury your child, to have to turn all the hopes and dreams you had for them into plans for their funerals, for there is something so viciously unfair about your child dying before you because it's supposed to be the other way around, we pass from life before our children do. It's bad enough when our kids pass away from illnesses like cancer or they die in an accident...to lose your child in a moment of someone else's violent hatred, it's just unthinkable.

So it is in Newtown, Connecticut, the unthinkable has happened. Twenty parents sent their kids off to school on that bright sunny morning and they know they will not be returning home…not now, not ever.

And it hurts..goddamnit, it HURTS because there is something so…so obscenely cruel and inherently perverse that those children killed were so young, so innocent, just like we once were. They liked drawing and singing and playing on the swings at recess; they liked watching cartoons and eating cake and ice cream on their birthdays; they liked going to the local fair in the summer and riding on the Ferris Wheel and carousel and eating cotton candy; they liked the colors pink and blue and orange and purple; they liked spending time with their Mom and their Dad…but maybe not their siblings because UGH, siblings can be such a pain at times!...they liked seeing Gramma and Grandpa and giving them hugs; they liked their dogs and their cats and their hamsters…they lived with joy in the moment and never gave a thought to the next day, or even the next five minutes, and they found such interest in the smallest of things…shapes in the clouds, fuzzy caterpillars, pretty autumn leaves and fresh white snow. They were us at that age, twenty years ago, forty years ago, sixty years ago, and they had their whole lives ahead of them, their futures so bright with promise and hope, with so many things to look forward to, like graduations and weddings and giving their parents grandchildren.

But like all little kids, they were probably looking forward the most to Christmas…to decorating the tree and baking cookies and making gingerbread houses; to going caroling and visiting Santa and surreptitously checking out the presents beneath the tree, trying sneakily to find out what was beneath that shiny wrapping paper; giggling as they wrapped that special present they had made their parents in art class, and now?

Now, instead of their parents watching their little ones opening those special gifts on Christmas Day that they had asked Santa for, they will be burying their child.

And how heartbreaking is that?

What's worse is how do you explain to your children what has happened there in Newtown, how do we assure them that school is still safe for them to go to on Monday morning? How do we help the children who survived this latest attack cope with what they've seen, knowing that the horror they witnessed will haunt their nightmares for years to come? Children, especially smaller children, tend to think in more abstract terms rather than logical ones, and if we adults struggle to explain the incomprehensible concept of such evil to ourselves, how do we explain to a kid that someone so hated the world around them, they decided to get some guns and go to the local elementary school to use children and their teachers for his sadistic target practice, turning their classrooms into a battlefield?

We can't.

But what we CAN do is tell our kids that it's okay to be scared and it's okay to be sad and it's okay to be angry because we are, too. We can tell them that school is still safe but if they're upset and need help or comfort in any way, that it will be there for them. We can reassure them that most of the world is not evil, and that even on such a dark, dark day, there were many wonderful, shining, brave heroes in those classrooms, both in the four teachers and the principal and the school counselor who so willingly gave their lives in order to save their kids, and in the other teachers that acted so quickly to get their children to safety, and in the first responders that arrived so fast and began the process of getting the kids out of the building. We can let our children…and our other loved ones…know that we love them and cherish them, and we can offer our prayers and support to Newtown, coming together as a nation to mourn for the 27 innocent lives cut so short, comforting the survivors and family members left behind, sharing with them our strength and our faith and our hope so that they may go on. And we can honor the memories of those 27 people and others lost so cruelly in past massacres in ways that go beyond erecting a granite memorial or placing flowers at the site…we can commit to serving our communities and our schools by offering time or talents or donations; we can help those around us by showing kindness and generosity and caring; we can take back our world with dignity and courage and pride and do whatever we can to make it a better place. We can never forget to let joy into our hearts and allow it to put smiles onto our faces, but the best way I know how to honor all those lost is really quite a simple one…

Remember to enjoy the innocent beauty of a bright sunny day.