Last Friday night, I lingered a bit longer over bedtime tuckings. We read together, gave kisses, and when Lila asked me to stay longer so we could chat, I didn’t hesitate. It’s been barely a week since the shooting in Sandy Hook Elementary, yet it feels like so much longer.
Something beautiful is forever gone. I speak not just of the lives of those 20 children and the 6 teachers who would have shaped their lives and others. I mean something fundamental no longer exists for us as a society.
This is one of those nation-defining loss of innocence moment. Pearl Harbor. 9/11. The Kennedy assassination. All events that no one ever believed could happen. They happened.
I lived in New York City on 9/11/2001, and in the weeks following, I consoled myself with Vic Chestnutt’s song called New Town. It’s a song of utopia, where even the loneliest old lady gets social calls, the police are all rookie because they’re not needed. For me, the perfect song of a perfect world to give me hope while walking through a city in deep morning.
The hard truth of utopian vision, though, is that utopia will never exist. Artists — writers, painters, film makers — create these visions to warn us or perhaps to inspire us to move toward an existence that is closer to the beauty we create in our art.
We may not have known prior to December 14, 2012 that we were walking on eggshells, that an event so drastic was coming, but Newtown happened because the elements to make it happen were already in play.
The deaths in Newtown present us with a very literal loss of innocence. Twenty chubby cheeked baby faces peer out from photos on the internet. They seem so alive. It is impossible to believe that they will not see another year. It is inconceivable. Unacceptable.
Nothing we do will change what happened. We cannot escape the unacceptable. We are stuck, now, in a world where small children are murdered without explanation, and we must find our way out of this predicament. Plenty suggestions have been offered, from gun control to access to better mental health measures. I don’t believe implementing either of these alone will make much of a difference. We need a more holistic approach, one that requires a shift in thinking toward supporting our communities.
We’ll never regain our innocence, but how do we best heal that which is broken?
