The Sandy Hook Shootings – My Thoughts

There will come a day, and I promise you this, that your will be having a discussion and the topic will come up of “Where were you when.”  It’s a feeling that many of us have experienced too many times.  Were were you when President Reagan was shot?  President Kennedy, The Space Shuttle’s etc.  Where were you?

Add Friday December 14th 2012 to that list.  A day that will not soon be forgotten by any of us.  All those souls vanished, lives ended before they could begin…. and questions that will never be answered.  A tragedy in every sense of the word.  My heart broke just like everyone else’s.

I was horribly disappointed in a few things though.  I was ashamed beyond belief of the coverage of this from the national news media.  I have to say, I honestly think with the wall to wall coverage provided, which has become the status-quo for any event like this, it added to the misery more than it informed a single person in this country.  HOURS and HOURS of speculation, the never ending press for more information the interviews with THIRD GRADERS as the “man on the street” it only shows a remarkably ill informed news media and that to the viewers… is a panic button.  Give us an alert, tell us the headline then come back when you have a clear picture of what has happened.  I was even more disgusted by the political action committees that began jumping in on the issue, but that’s a story for another day.  I saw one rational, yet emotional person speaking Friday and that was Dr. Drew on CNN.

Dr. Drew simply said in a nutshell, that the divisions in this country are the cause of things like this, and I have to agree.  We spend more time worrying about who wants to marry who, we spend more time worrying about making the bottom line for the company or making sure the quarterly report is done by the deadline so some number cruncher somewhere can give an adequate report to a faceless group of stock holders so they can collect their bonus.  No longer do we worry about making a call to an old friend just to see how life is treating them.  No longer do we even dare to ask a stranger “Hey, How are ya?”  No longer do we have enough wherewithal to straighten out the neighbor kid who is becoming a bad influence on themselves and others.  If a call comes home from a teacher, we go right to our guns and say “Well, my little angel would never do something like that”….it goes on and on folks.  We have become a self serving society and when we are not serving ourselves, we are serving a puppet master called money.  It’s true we all need it, but we need each other more.

We need to take a couple steps back and be grateful for what we have as opposed to what we want.  We need to realize that no matter where we work, or what we do for a living it will ALWAYS come down to the people that are doing the work.  What are we doing for those PEOPLE instead of paychecks?  How today, can you or I make that infinitely small investment in a fellow human and let them see that no matter how dark the day, there is some kind of hope out there, and if there is no hope out there…what can we do to change that?

This is just a simple plea, from a simple guy.  Make a difference in anyway you can.  Reach out to that overly quiet kid you see, ask an elderly person if you can do anything for them, call an old friend and ask them how life is.  It’s all really as simple as that.  We humans are complex creatures that is for sure, but we are also the creatures on this earth with the most compassion, the greatest ability to have an effect on our own destiny and the greatest ability to fix what ail’s us.  There will be only one end to evil, and that is the day the earth ceases to exist, until then we have to rely on each other, with all of our petty differences, and the sooner we can get past the things that mean nothing, the sooner we can begin to curtail acts like this.

Your thought’s and comments are welcome below