I
have passed through Newtown at least 10,000 times during the past 50 years, but
the next time won't be the same. No, I need to amend and revise my recollection
of the quiet, unchanging bucolic New England town with the tall flag pole, so
that I can include it truthfully in the anthology of that sad collection of
horrific narratives we Americans usually forget or are too embarrassed to tell
our children, the one's yet born or too young to tell tales of atrocities. I speak
about the massacres that have stalked us throughout our history; those perpetrated
against Native Americans, Blacks, and protestors against injustice. Now history
authors a new volume, one filled with stories about how we stood silent in the
twenty-first century, when men, women, and children were executed by
gun-wielding mentally ill, psychopaths and thrill-seekers. The first chapter rails
over how boisterous voices and profiteers fanned our paranoia about everything
from a government run amuck to the generalized notion we are made safer packing
a gun. Newtown, Aurora, Blacksburg. . . Red Lake. . . Columbine, Greenwood . .
., violence that no civilized people would have tolerated becomes commonplace.
No,
massacres are not new to the American way of life: but its current modus operandi is; and so are the
perpetrators, not crazed mobs, posses or military forces, but lone gunmen, who
have the presence of mind to acquire weapons, plan and carry out mayhem;--and so
are the detractors who argue callously about Second Amendment rights trumping
sensible gun laws; and so are those who deride
treatment for the mental ill in favor of incarceration; and so are those that degrade
and desensitize the value of life by peddling images of war and violence to the
children.
We are story-telling animals, who
aspire to explain our place in the Universe. It is a solemn business, which for
all the parables passed down from generation to generation, ultimately speaks
to the tradition that becomes our truth--one which informs what is right and
wrong and what we must do to maintain our humanity. And, thus our obligation as
reporters to future generation requires the courage to report the facts, all of
them--and, not rationalized, sweetened by personal gain or cast in bitter political
ideology. What story do we tell our child, our neighbor, ourselves, when maniacs
kill men, women and children? Are they stories about the pluck to change our circumstance,
or about how we cowered to the diatribes of a few paranoid citizens or the insensible
corporation and those who give it voice, for no other ostensible purpose except
profit?
Unregulated firearm sales make gun-moguls millionaires, while their products in the hands of men with minds fraught by illness or criminal intent make us childless. Every shot in every homicide by gunfire rips through the fabric of someone's family and the security of the entire society--it forces peaceful citizens to arm. What tale do we tell future generations? Is it the one where we mustered the guts to change the laws that led to this aberrant succession of events? Or is it the one where we told them to arm themselves? Or is it that we told them that we did nothing, remained silent against the detractors, the hawks, leaving it to godless luck to decide who among us would be next.
Like the student who planned to conceal a bird in his hands and ask
the old man to guess what he was holding and, if he guessed a bird, the boy
would ask whether it was dead or alive. If the old man guessed "dead," the boy
would let the bird fly. But, if the man guessed the bird was alive, the boy
would crush out its life and open his hands to reveal a dead bird. The boy
finally asked, "Is the bird alive or dead?" And the old man replied, "My son,
the answer to that question is in your hands."
