As a parent, I shook (not figuratively but literally, I shook) watching news reports today.
Twenty children started their morning as they always do -- maybe they said goodbye to their parent with a loving hug, or maybe they yelled and screamed at mom and dad, or got yelled and screamed at (as is wont to happen from time to time in even the families with the perfect holiday postcards pictures).
By lunch today however, 20 elementary school children were dead.
I'll let Bob Costas do his thing on Monday night Football and denounce our gun culture, because this piece is not about that. However, as a side note if you want to bring any arguments about a well-regulated militia and are not prepared to talk about the needed reforms to our gun laws, I'd advise you to re-think your argument, because guns do kill people.
You can argue cars kill people (so why don't we eliminate cars?) all you want, but the key difference, as I have explained elsewhere, is that cars are designed to get you from point A to point B. Guns are designed to do exactly what they did today in Newtown, CT.
Most gun owners are responsible and will never end the life of another human being with their weapon. There will be speculation that the shooter was crazy. Insane. Or even, perhaps, a sociopath; a criminal who lacked a sense of moral responsibility or social conscience.
And that is what this piece is about. This piece is about crazy. America has gone crazy.
As a parent, my natural empathy goes out to the parents who rushed to the school today and found out that their child was murdered.
And then I thought of children -- innocent children all over the world who die senselessly. A half-million children in Iraq died as a result of sanctions the United States put in place before we shocked and awed the country back to the stone ages, killing untold numbers more children in the process. When Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked if it was worth it she replied that while it was a hard choice, yes it was worth it.
In Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen, under Obama's direction, too many children have started their days as they always do children started their morning as they always do. Perhaps they said goodbye to their parents with a loving hug, or maybe they yelled and screamed at mom and dad (or got yelled and screamed at, as is wont to happen from time to time in even the families who live in countries far from America's shores) and they were killed by drone strikes. Their parents rushing to the scene just as parents did in Connecticut last week.
If the shooter or shooters in Connecticut, and in the mall in Oregon or the movie theater in Colorado were crazy, what word do we have for the men and women in suits who execute U.S. foreign policy, waging wars based on lies for profit?