Article written on The Examiner!
I was standing in front
of a TD Bank ATM machine when I found out about what happened at Sandy Hook
Elementary School. I had asked someone
who had entered the vestibule after me how he was. He responded by telling me that he was fine
up until fifteen minutes ago.
Apparently, he had just found about the tragic shooting that had taken
place in Newtown, Connecticut. When he
told me, I couldn’t believe it.
The first thing that
came to my mind was the children and their families. I couldn’t understand how someone could take
the lives of so many innocent children.
As the details continued to unfold and I found out more about what had
taken place on Friday, my heart broke. I
thought about the parents that lost their child; how they probably finished
their Christmas shopping for their children and how those presents will go unopened. 
There are so many
components to this tragedy but none of them make any sense. There were too many innocent lives lost. They were babies who were beginning their
lives that were taken away far too soon.
Even now as I type this, my heart is breaking once again. I watched as a parent of one of the victims
barely managed to contain himself as he talked about his daughter. He was a better one than me because I
couldn’t.
I do not have children
of my own, but I have nephews and nieces that I adore. They know me as uncle and they have so much
love for me that it fills my heart to the point of bursting. To think that this could have easily happened
to one of them is incomprehensible.
I can’t begin to ask
myself why this man thought to take the lives of so many innocent people. We can attribute it to mental illness. We can speculate that there are too many graphic
video games on the market that desensitizes our youth. We can say that we need to pay closer
attention to our children and participate in their lives to prevent tragedies
like this from occurring.
But the simple truth of
the matter is that there are too many moving parts to this tragedy to lay blame
to one area. All we know is that we as a
nation have to come together to grieve and lift up the families that have lost
someone in this senseless violent act.
We need to understand that gun lobbying isn’t going to stop massacres
like this. It’s not about gun control.
The problem goes much deeper than that.
We need to recognize when someone in our respective families may display
characteristics of someone that may need mental help. We may need to take the stigma off of someone
that needs the skill set of a mental health provider to help them address any issues that they may be dealing with.
But here is a question
that I want to leave everyone with. Have
we as a nation become so desensitized to the needs of our fellow man that we
have forgotten how to love? Have we
become so engrossed in getting through the day to day that we have forgotten
how to care? And is caring the first
step in resolving this problem?
J.L. Whitehead
