When 20 children were murdered two weeks before Christmas in Newtown, Connecticut, my worldview shifted.
To me, the violent shooting deaths of babies who were contemplating sugar plums and Santa challenged my belief in a good and loving God. There was no reason, no justification, no earthly or celestial explanation as to why such evil could enter a school.
Guns, mental illness and bad parenting were all thrown around as the cause of the catastrophe, and I even went to our state capitol to speak before our legislature about the importance of preventing people with mental health issues from ever touching the trigger of a gun.
But nothing could make the deaths of the children make any sense, and the lobbying and the anger and all of the social media posts and the letters to Congress and the promises of “never again,” which of course became “look away until the next thing happens,” were just noise.
I think that’s because children died.
Although six brave adults were also murdered that cold December day, it is hard for me to conjure their faces. They were heroes, and tried to shield the children from the bullets, and they had families that will mourn them for eternity.
But I don’t see them when I hear the phrase “Sandy Hook.” I see the smiles of the babies, and it never fails to make something crumple inside of me, the part of me that believes in the essential goodness of people.
That is not a given anymore.
And the thing that always angered me about Newtown was that people on both sides of the aisle, but especially the gun control activists on one particular side, tried to exploit the tragedy by playing partisan politics over the bodies of 7-year-olds.
You can understand how mourning parents would beg for laws that would stop the next class of kindergartners from being caught in the scope of a mad and evil man. But the way that some Democrats used the tragedy to attack their Republican opponents, as if the latter were rejoicing in the death of children, was repellent.
The phrase “Second Amendment” became a curse, and anyone who argued for anything less than a total ban on what was incorrectly called “automatic weapons” was told they had Newtown blood on their hands
Using children to advance a political goal is probably the most disgusting thing human beings can do.
Adults do it all the time, including some conservatives who, for example, point to children born in this country of undocumented parents as “invaders.” But that is for another column.
Right now, I’m angry at the left for using the deaths of little girls at Camp Mystic in much the same way as it used the death of the Newtown children: to hurt their political opponents.
I have read, and reread, comments about the tragedy in Texas. The overwhelming majority are from good human beings who have not been stripped of their compassion. That is a comfort. And virtually all, but not all, of the people I respect (or respected) have found within themselves the ability to grieve for children and the adults who loved them.
But as is so often the case, there are those who are like driftwood on the roiling sea of humanity, pushed inexorably toward the furthest shores. They have lost any semblance of decency. They hate President Donald Trump, and those of us who either voted for him or did not vote for his opponent, and those who refuse to bow to their superior status as sole arbiters of a better society, so much that they are using the lifeless bodies of little girls and the emptied souls of their parents as ammunition to wound their enemies.
For clarity, these same people lied about the damage that would be done by a bill, that while in so many ways objectionable, does not starve children, throw the elderly out of nursing homes, or arm a rising immigration Gestapo.
It is clear to me that the hatred of a man and his politics has eaten up these people from the inside out, leaving zombie husks that appear to be human but are nothing more than mobile corpses.
That we cannot simply take a moment to pause and mourn together the extinguishing of such bright and promising lights is a terrible commentary about who we are, and who we have not stopped being since Adam Lanza stole the world from bright-eyed babies.
Actually, since well before that.
Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times in Pennsylvania.
