I've kind of had to sit on my hands for a bit as the news from Connecticut is being dissected. Although it is new, it is fresh, the details are hauntingly all too familiar. And in the bloody aftermath, the survivors are left to sift through the ashes and ask themselves a question that's asked too often these days: Why?
Many people are asking where God was yesterday as the events unfolded. However, as Longfellow penned "...God is not dead, nor doth He sleep, the wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, goodwill to men". God was not absent yesterday, nor was He gleefully punishing the school for the lack of prayer within its walls. I cannot pretend to speak for God, but I can say with authority that both of those statements are true.
The answer to what happened yesterday is not gun control, not censorship, not "putting God back in schools". It is, to put it simply and succinctly, putting compassion and humanity back in our hearts.
We've come to worship things so much that we no longer care or concern ourselves with the needs of those around us. The shooter, whose name I will not mention in order to not be a party to the further spread of his infamy, was a person in a deep, dark place that most of us will never know. It's the kind of place a person doesn't reach without a lot of negative influences around them.
It's easy to hate the shooter, easy to wickedly imagine him turning on some spit in some deep, dark reaches of Hell. But if life has taught us anything, it is that the easy path is often the wrong one, and while we cannot in any way condone or mitigate the actions of the shooter on this fateful day, we can ask ourselves if there are any such people among us, and if so, how we can work to both save them from themselves and save those around them from their hurt. We are, after all, only as strong as our weakest link.
Looking at the myriad of solutions proposed by armchair policy makers, I have to ask: would strict gun control laws have made a difference? Reluctantly, I have to admit they might have; but they might have simply forced him to find another weapon. Would censoring violent material have made a difference? Almost certainly, but with the unintended consequences of opening the door to even broader censorship that would do more harm than good. Would prayer in the schools have made a difference? It might have made a small difference in helping to set the shooter's moral compass, but again with unintended consequences that would not be acceptable.
The only thing, the single thing, that MIGHT have made a difference is if someone would have taken the time to get to know this hurting individual; if several someones would have seen the investment in this tortured, tormented soul as more important than their own needs.
We can't unwind the clock, and in the end we'll never know what precisely ignited the series of events that unfolded on December 14, 2012. But wwe would be remiss if we didn't ask ourselves what we can do to prevent the next tragedy from occurring. Take time to reach out, to listen, to heal "the least of these". The life you save just may be your own.
