Don't You Ever Ask Them Why, If they Told You, You Would Cry

By Bobbie L. Washington

How can we explain away the lives of 20 incomplete futures and six guiding hands to see it through? Newtown, Connecticut unfortunately joins 30 other communities across the United States in a fraternity of tragedies imposed by people suffering from a form of mental illness. Our senses come under fire with a myriad of questions off why, who did this, how can this happen again? We are shocked again, this is no scripted reality show. Twenty six lives woke up one morning to go to elementary school without a care in the world. Crayons, Elmer’s glue, safety scissors and construction paper should have been the only thing on these 20 young lives minds as they probably were cutting out things with a Christmas decorating theme.. 

A community of tranquility where people moved to raise their children in a setting almost pristine to life now suffers a ripple effect when this lone madness destroyed the calm. There are children who are now called survivors and we don’t know as yet how many saw their classmates dead? The long term impact of nightmares loom large. There is a school that holds this new horror. How can they go back to this school? How can parents let their children go to school after this? Elementary schools will now have armed patrols. This was suppose to be a safe haven. This was suppose to be the unwritten, unspoken rule that nothing was suppose to happen to little children at elementary schools. This was suppose to be about Christmas and innocence, not anymore.

And what of this latest madman? The guns he used were obtained legally just like the other weapons used in many of the other communities And like many of the suspects, there was. the revelation that mental illness was the catalyst into these carnage. Gabriel Gifford’s shooter was mentally ill. The Batman movie theater shooter was mentally ill. The Virginia Tech shooter was mentally ill. As anger grows about gun control, there isn’t anything that can be done to force a person with mental illness to take his medicine. We have freedom of speech to scream at the top of our lungs about this latest tragedy and the mentally ill have the right not to take their medicine if they don’t want to. They cannot be compelled to take it because we live in the same society that gives even the mentally ill free will even though they are incapable of making rational thought. They deludes themselves into thinking that they have control over their emotions and on occasion, they stop taking their medication because they think they are fine or because the medicine makes them feel funny. But the laws we subscribe to gives them the right not to be forced into taking the medication.

As humans, we have evolved over the centuries where one would think that the evil that is put upon us would have tempered such behavior but it has not. The holocaust of World War I was never suppose to happen again that even the United Nations made it a resolution to take actions against any country that conducts such atrocities. Unfortunately we have not learned from our past. Over 800,000 killed in Africa from warring tribes and brutal dictators practicing genocide. Saddam Hussein uses chemical weapons on thousands of his own countrymen because of their religious affiliation while mass graves are discovered after his empire collapse. Our nation has its history of atrocities as well from the specters of slavery to the wholesale elimination of Native American tribes sanctioned by our own very government under broken treaties for land grabs to their sacred territory.

There is evil that has stayed in our collective culture for many centuries. History says that it will never go away. There are twenty children that are gone. There could have been a future doctor who discovered the gene that causes Parkinson’s. There could have been a future Nobel Peace Prize winner who ended the Middle East conflict in the Arab states. There could have been a future NASA scientist who made it possible to actually travel through space at warp speed. There could have been a future Olympian gold medalist who shattered twelve long standing records. There could have been a future American president who got the GOP to get in line and work for the people of the United States. There could have been the next great American writer who would go on to be compared to Hemingway or Salinger.

In science fiction movies where time travel is possible, the scenario of a person going back in time is to not do anything to disrupt anything in the future. If that possibility truly existed, it seems as if some traveler has come back in time a disrupted the future of twenty children. It seems like no matter how much we see in life, how horrible a tragedy may happen, there is another one that comes along and shocks us again. The nation has witness these dates, December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001.  As tragic as these events were, we are resolute in our convictions to stand strong while feeling the most horrific of pain. Madmen are here. They walk among us everyday. They conduct willful acts of human indecency. And as we mourn another new loss, we persevere to not let the madmen win. At the end of the day, it will not be about the mentally ill with access to guns, it will be about us and how we deal with preventing this from happening again.