i'm posting this on my camp blog instead of my real life one because when you say "innocent children," i think of my campers.
i'm not going to go on a political rant; there are so many people talking about gun control and abortion right now, i'm sure my opinion has already been said by someone else.
i'm just thinking out loud, trying to wrap my mind around the fact that 20 kids the same age as my campers are dead today.
20 happy little lives stamped out right before christmas.
now i know this isn't anything even close to what they're feeling,
but it's my only point of reference since i don't have any real kids to
love.
i imagine that a mom is like a cabin leader squared. i think about how much i love my girls, and i try to imagine loving a kid more than that. but they aren't actually
my girls. their moms must love them so much more(this is why for me, camp is not "the best birth control" as some people say; it makes me want my own kids even more).
so i'm thinking about how i'd feel if
one of my campers died, in any way, much less like this. and i try to multiply
that 100 times, to come even close to picturing what these parents in connecticut must feel, and honestly, if i were in that position, i think i would
die. i'd lose every ounce of my will to live and just die on the spot.
no matter what kind of psychological disorder you've got going on, who could look at, as obama so perfectly described them, "beautiful little children between the ages of 5 and 10" and want to see them die? i don't even think people screwed up enough to molest a child could bring themselves to kill one.
and not that high schoolers deserve it or anything, but seriously these were
little kids. you hear about teenagers getting shot all the time(which i repeat, is still horrible and i wish that didn't happen either), but not kids. people don't even shoot up elementary schools on tv. it's so unthinkable, we don't even think to make up stories about it happening.
there are so many people hurting in so many ways right now. being the obnoxiously compassionate person i am, i'm feeling a little bit of each of them.
in my marriage and family class this semester, when we learned about family stress, we broke into groups and made lists of normative and non-normative stressors. we'd learned that a child dying at a young age was non-normative, so my group listed ways that might happen. we said things like car wrecks, cancer or other diseases, choking to death, falling down the stairs, and tried to think of really crazy freak accidents that could happen.
not one person in the room said "getting shot at school."
i doubt any parent drops their kid off at school in the morning and even vaguely wonders if they'll ever see them again. your kid's school is such a normal part of your life, a taken-for-granted safe place. i feel like even if my kid was okay, my whole world would be shaken up if something like this happened. i'd start questioning everything. if an elementary school isn't safe, what is?
what about the kids?
the ones who died? they're so little. appreciating life is a granted, automatic thing for them; they haven't yet needed to be taught that life is short. most of them don't understand death at all. they probably hadn't wondered a day in their life if it might be their last day.
and the ones who survived? the shooter only came into two classrooms; were there some who never saw him, but had siblings or cousins or friends who were killed?
what would you even do with that? if you had one child make it out and the other died. that's the most overwhelming scenario i can imagine. being so happy and thankful on the one hand to have one safe with you, while not even knowing what to do with yourself over losing the other.
what about people like me, off at college with siblings at home? i have a brother in fifth grade. i wouldn't want to get a phone call to hear he'd been shot, or even been anywhere where he could have been shot, if i wasn't able to rush straight home to my family. it was bad enough freshman year when i had to be far away and hear the news that my granddad died, and i was basically prepared for that but i still shut down, stopped eating, quit doing my homework and lost my scholarship. so if i got a total shock, like a family member getting killed, much less my
little brother? again i think i'd probably die. if not from rapid hope loss, then from attempting to hitchhike home as fast as i could.
where's the hope in this? what's the good that God plans on using all this for? parents whose kids die of cancer can help other parents going through the same thing. kids who get paralyzed can grow up and write books about how they managed to still live a great life. but this is just ridiculous. i know this fits with the plan somewhere, but God's gonna have to get pretty creative here.
if nothing else, i hope this is a wakeup call to parents who don't love their kids enough. the parents of the campers who say they don't want to go home because their parents don't hug them or talk to them or just hang out with them like their counselors do. i hope they start appreciating the little miracle they have.
i wish it didn't take tragedies like this to make that happen.
