So Much Never-Ending Pain

It's been nine years since the murder of innocents at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I've lived here since November of 1991 and confess to never having been there prior to the tragic events of that day. 

I can remember harboring, in the hours and immediate days following the carnage, a belief, more of a hope, really, that this time something would change in how we Americans come to grips with our fascination bordering on addiction with guns. Events in Detroit are just a more recent confirmation that saying we have to change isn't enough, especially if we never change. 

I wrote what follows as parents were still making arrangements to bury their children almost a decade ago. I called it:    

Putting Names to the Souls of the Departed

No other animal works harder to rationalize our sometimes unthinking behavior than do we-no other animal is even capable of seeing the absurdity and contradiction of how we so often live our lives. Because the carnage at Newtown, Connecticut, happened in the state in which I reside I'm haunted by a feeling very similar to the aftermath of 9-11-01.

I suspect you've been doing what I've been doing: watching television and reading rafts of online commentary and analysis (a three-dollar word for what on my block we called a WAG) nearly non-stop assuming, persisting in the belief might be a better phrase, that at some point a penny is going to drop, a light is going to go on and someone, somewhere will say or write something that causes us each to have an 'aha!' moment and understand what has gone on.

Both of us are only reluctantly starting to accept the notion that there may well never be a nice, neat, explanation with a timeline and expert testimony that explains the inexplicable. Leaving so many moms and dads and friends and relatives of the deceased (an abstraction of the first order) not to even start to think about the surviving school-children with holes in their hearts that will never heal.

Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School weren't 'victims,' they were people, mostly incredibly tiny and very young people. The Innocents included:

Charlotte Bacon, 6; Daniel Barden, 7; Rachel Davino, 29; Olivia Engel, 6; Josephine Gay, 7; Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6; Dylan Hockley, 6; Dawn Hochsprung, 47; Madeleine F. Hsu, 6; Catherine V. Hubbard, 6; Chase Kowalski, 7; Jesse Lewis, 6; James Mattioli, 6; Grace McDonnell, 7; Anne Marie Murphy, 52; Emilie Parker, 6; Jack Pinto, 6; Noah Pozner, 6; Caroline Previdi, 6; Jessica Rekos, 6; Avielle Richman, 6; Lauren Rousseau, 30; Mary Sherlach, 56; Victoria Soto, 27; Benjamin Wheeler, 6 and Allison N. Wyatt, 6.

"This is a prayer for the souls of the departed" and sadly we should all know it by heart.
-bill kenny