Gone Too Soon!

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 couldn’t write about the man that committed this horrendous crime because I just couldn’t bring myself to lend credence to the act that he committed.  I didn’t want to give him any coverage because this isn’t about him.  This is about the babies that were lost.

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