As I was leaving to go to work this morning my daughter informed me that there was another mass shooting, this time in front of the Empire State Building...and I heard myself say "so how many shot this time?" It's like I can't even muster amazement or horror, it's just, "how many this time?"
It was 3 weeks ago and 10 minutes from my home, that a deranged neo-nazi decided to stroll into a Sikh temple on a warm Sunday morning and shoot everyone he could...It was a gorgeous August day outside, clear blue sky, no clouds and yet I spent the entire Sunday afternoon inside, glued to the television set...just a couple of weeks before that it was the mass shooting at the Colorado movie theatre...The night before, my son informed me he had tickets to a midnight showing of the new Batman movie and I was uneasy, he told me to "stop worrying, what could possibly happen at a movie theatre?"
I'm sure that for the next couple of weeks we'll be subjected to all sorts of stories about the shooter, like what kind of student was he in grade school, were his parents nice neighbors, did he have a hamster, or "what possibly could've convinced this loser that this was a good idea???" Not that it matters, the damage is done...but for the next couple of weeks it's going to be the life history of this loser...til the next loser...
And maybe that's the problem...you want to be famous but you don't want to do the work that goes with earning fame, but if you have a vendetta...fame is cheap and easy, and every news channel in the country will beat down your door, or your neighbors door fighting other news channels to obtain and reveal your life story...until the next loser comes along, and your story is filed away in the loser trivia section of mass shooters...mentioned occasionally until the various lawsuits are dried up and the only two people who will really care about you are your mother and satan...
And how quickly the rest of us forget the shooters, do you even remember the big shooter story from six years ago? It was October of 2006 and the shooter was the local Pennsylvania milkman who shot 10 little Amish girls killing 5 of them...Remember what happened next? The families of the children killed promptly forgave him and offered their support to his widow and children...
Wow!
What's wilder...that their forgiveness made major headlines...shows you how rare something like that is...And I'm a little ashamed too...not at the fact that they can forgive and I, probably not as much...but the fact that I always sort of, well, while I didn't think I was better then the Amish, but I certainly didn't understand how they could stubbornly cling to the 1800's while the rest of us went wizzing by them in 2006...
My son and I were driving towards Iowa one freezing January Sunday morning earlier that year on Highway 18 when we passed several of the Wisconsin Amish on their way towards church...I had the heat blaring and the radio on and they were huddled together in open air wagons with blankets...my son had never seen Amish before and simply couldn't believe that they didn't have cars, and television and PS 2's..."they don't want to live in our world" I told him then...and today, who can blame them? But the fact that they could forgive and continue to love after all that has happened to them...well, I'm not even in their league.
Cindy Huber
1 comment:
It's just tragic. And I agree with you, the perpetrator gets too much attention. If you ask me, he shouldn't even be mentioned in the news stories. Or just claim "an anonymous person" did this. No focus on him at all, zero, zilch. Lock him away, throw away the key, and what happens to him after that, I don't want to know. I don't need to know what he had for breakfast or who his favorite teletubby was growing up.
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