A Day We Come Together

I’m sitting in my office. It is December 14, 2012. I took a break after an appointment, and read online about the school shooting in Connecticut.

The next articles are about Piers Morgan, Michael Moore, Jennifer Granholm and Mayor Bloomberg calling for an end to the Second Amendment of the Constitution.  I want to make a few notes before this becomes old, I calm down, and it gets back to the business as usual of dividing this country.

As a parent I am sick to my stomach. What do you do when you hear there is a mass shooting at the school where your children attend? What happens when you rush to the location, and the police will not let you get close?  How does life go on if your child did not survive?  What do you say to your child, of 8 years, when they have witnessed a war, in their supposedly safe school?  How do you stay mentally stable knowing you are powerless to stop something like this happening again due to a copycat shooter?

In the coming days we will learn more of this tragedy. Apparently this sick person killed his mother and many of her young students. We will learn that  everybody/nobody saw this coming based on the shooter's personality. We will probably learn the mother was a model teacher who influenced many lives in a positive way, but somehow her child became lost.

We will learn there were heroes, cowards and panicked people inside the school.

The heroes will be dazed and unsure of what happened; they will be confused as to why people are amazed at their actions. The others will be trying to understand, why they acted as they did.  

Nobody walks away from a battle unaffected. For everybody at that school life will never be the same. The people at that school will never again feel completely safe. Doctors will work with them, but when you see someone die, someone you knew, the survivor will always feel guilty about their own survival.

We as a nation need to turn to these who would make political hay of this incident, to push their political agenda, and express our dismay at their actions.

At the same time, we need to gather with our families, our friends and our place of worship and pull for the families.

Those of us who are religious, we can pray for these families.  Those who are not religious can pause to give positive thoughts to those suffering.

In a few weeks, we can then pull away from each other and go back to the bickering.  We will be fine, it was not our families. We can tell the other side why they are wrong. But one thing will never be the same. 

We will always remember 12/14/12, and know that we as a society were hurt by the actions of a sick person. This is all about people, this is not the time for pointing fingers and trying to make it political. Come on folks, we are in this together.