Vigil for the Children

Use the wonders of your own intelligence and the rivers of your empathy to become, each of you, the sort of humans who ride into the world determined to create conditions where fewer of your fellows have to face the daily possibility of premature death descending upon them. Tell the dead you leave behind that you will not be engulfed by fear.
--Ariel Dorfman.

Tonight a vigil was held at this playground next to a local school, to remember the children and to organize for gun control.

As the media frenzy continues to focus on Connecticut, I cry, and I also remember the children in Gaza, in Norway, in Darfur, in India, in Colombia, in Afghanistan, and on the streets of Cleveland. Here was one very sick child (a 20-year-old is still a child) who did a horrible thing. Children are killed every day by bombs, drones, rockets, assault weapons, and mines all over the world, and we behave as if that's normal. When it happens far away to children we don't know, we don't hold vigils and organize to stop the violence. Why is that? Why don't we all care passionately every day about ending violence?

I attended my first meeting to organize for gun control right after President Kennedy was killed. We have these movements year after year. The same cast of characters shows up: lefty liberal soft-on-crime bleeding progressives, the lot of us. Sometimes we succeed, and when the next Republican administration comes in, bolstered by the gun lobby, they wipe out everything we worked for. We'll try again now.

Guns are a problem in the USA. But guns are not the only problem. The so-called mental health system is a problem. Pharmaceuticals prescribed to adolescents diagnosed with mental illness are a problem. Living in a fearful society is a terrible problem because when people are afraid they arm themselves and prepare themselves mentally to commit violence against an imagined enemy.

I stand with my neighbors on the playground by the school, sobbing and wishing: may we not be engulfed by fear, may we show our children that we value kindness more than defensiveness, may we remember that we are all one people, and that language, state borders, skin color, and flags are small irrelevancies next to our bond of shared humanity. All the children are our children. May we show the children that our love is greater than our fear.