Newtown, Connecticut….12/14/12

I am almost never a late-breaking-news blogger.  I need time to sift and sort and ponder.  The facts have been splashed across newspapers and covered by the news media.  Just in case you’ve been in ICU or lived in the deep woods without electricity or a newspaper subscription during this horrific ordeal,  a 20-year old crazed shooter enters Shady Hook Elementary School and single-handedly guns down twenty kids and five adults and kills his mother and then himself.

I ache for those families.  The world aches for those families.  Families who were celebrating Friday and a weekend ahead.  Maybe they poured Cheerios for breakfast. Maybe they went over the spelling list, magnetized to the refrig.  Glanced at the headlines of the morning paper.  Maybe the weekend included a visit to Santa at the mall. Or a classmate’s birthday party.  Maybe someone could only find one mitten. Maybe Dad went out to warm up the car.  Maybe someone looking for their library book, or nearly forgetting a brown sack lunch, the refrain of “hurry, hurry” as background noise.  Twenty little people, who smiled with gap-toothed mouths….lives snuffed out.

Imagine standing outside the school hearing snippets of the bloodbath that had occurred on the doorstep of their little elementary school, wondering if their kid was coming out, dragging his/her backpack on the ground, pale and deer-in-the-headlights-scared, traumatized in ways no one will know the real extent of for years. Scanning the crowd looking for Mommy.  Or coming out horizontally, on a stretcher, lifeless.  All in a heartbeat.  The moment that would separate the that-was-then-and-this-is-now.  The before and the after.

How can we possibly make sense of what doesn’t make sense?  The nation grieves….not only for the loss of those young kiddo’s lives but for the loss of a sense of safety that we, as a nation don’t know how to get back.

Who puts a bomb in their underwear?  What kind of a monster does that?  And what was the exact moment when the man who took the lives of all those people in Newtown — what was the moment when it all started to go all wrong for the twenty year old man?  What caused this train wreck?

I don’t think this is about guns.  The bad guys will always be able to get their hands on a gun.  I think that we as a country just better wake up and do something about the pathetic state of our   mental illness resources.  Insurance companies are calling the shots.  They seem to think they know more about how many sessions someone needs with a therapist than the therapist does. Huh?  Some clerk playing God.

How many people looked the other way?  Had some teacher, some coach, some scout leader taken a minute to ask this young man how he was doing?  He was odd.  He was bullied.  And no adult took his “emotional temperature”.

I work at a middle school in the urban core.  I work with Alternative Education kids. And each day when these kids come in my room I ask, “How are you today?”  Not in a sing-song way, but look ’em in the eye and see what I see there.  Bad morning? Hungry?  Out of sorts?  Raging?  Defiant?  That doesn’t make me anything special…..it’s my job.  The most important thing I do is not teaching Algebra II or Social Studies.  My job is to give these kids everything I have and some of what they need.  Of course I come up short.  I can’t control what goes on in their homes.  I can’t control the number of brain cells each kid came to me with.  But my classroom is a safe one.  Bullying is not tolerated.  Nor is standing by and watching someone else get bullied.

God bless those little people.  And their families.  And the community that is still reeling.  Trying to make sense of what is still raw.