Our Hearts Are Broken Today

“Our hearts are broken today.”

How the hell do you get your head around a tragedy like this? We’ll learn more in the upcoming days but I don’t know that there’s any motive that will ever make sense to me. I can’t – won’t – put a value on any human life but these were children. If it were a massacre of adults it wouldn’t be any less horrific but I think maybe I could rationalize it a little bit because hey, they’re adults and they’ve lived and maybe enjoyed life. But children? Twenty children between five and 10 years old; they’re goddamn babies for crying out loud.

The anti-gun arguments will start up again now and I couldn’t care less because they don’t mean anything and they don’t get us anywhere. I’m not a gun person, but banning guns isn’t the answer to anything and that’s because you can’t legislate stupidity and you can’t legislate insanity. We already have gun laws in this country and let’s start enforcing them before we go about making more and then we’ll have time to start addressing the culture of violence we perpetuate here and take a good hard look at violence on television, at violence in movies, at violence in song lyrics, and at violence in video games.

That’s it for me on the subject. It’s way too depressing to think about a son killing his mother, or a parent sending their kid off to school and that kid never coming back home. It suck to think about a family and their extended family having to associate Chanukah or Christmas with a psychopathic nutbag who murdered their son/daughter/brother/sister/cousin/friend/neighbor for the rest of their lives. I don’t want to hear any more about the story and I don’t want to hear the debates on the news talk shows. I want us to bury the dead and I want us to remember this day forever and I want us to get about the business of fixing our country before it’s too goddamn late. I want my heart to heal.

“Our hearts are broken today.” President Barack Obama, December 14, 2012