God Bless Newtown, Connecticut

As I was painting my daughter (Mirieanah's) nails while watching the Falcons game, I looked her in the eyes and I realized that she was the same age as a good majority of the children in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that occured the other day. She looked at me and smiled and I couldn't help but tear up and feel a sense of remorse and guilt. In less than two weeks I will see the joy and amazement in her eyes as she opens her gifts and twenty families will be forced to look under their trees and see gifts wrapped recently as three weeks prior that will never be opened by the little hands that awaited them...

Mirieanah Alessa

 

 

I could never imagine life without this little girl. In fact, I couldn't imagine getting a call from the Leominster Police Department telling me that my Princess had been shot after I dropped her off at the 'safest' place in the world I could think of.

 

Each day as we get older as parents, it seems the people that are getting more and more violent are getting younger and younger. We as a human race need to say enough is enough. We need to embrace mental illness and recognize it as a condition and take care of our own. It's time to draw the line. We need to get rid of the NIMBY mentality and take off our blinders or these types of horrific things will continue to happen. Our children will someday be the next adults of the world and we have a responsibility to arm them with the tools they need to be the responsible generation that heals the world and takes care of each other and does not destroy it. For those of us that are in our early thirties, we came into this world at the tail end of Vietnam (not considered a war, but a conflict) and we have had two wars, child molestation was not 'mainstream' news until late ninties, and public widespread (school, open-area, etc) violence didn't start really until Columbine, then 9/11.

 

Now imagine what our children will go through with all this technology? Facebook, new weaponry, internet access making things faster and mainstream? Scared yet? We have the ability to change how they see the world. What they do with that knowledge is up to us. Even those of us that don't have children still have a responsibility to each other. We need to start looking after each other. Forget the labels. Who cares who is Christian or not? Gay or straight? Republican or Democrat?

 

Maybe one of the children that lost their lives the other day was being raised by a gay or lesbian couple. So what? Irrelevant. Or maybe they shared different views than what your views are. Again irrelevant. Maybe even different than mine. Doesn't matter. The fact is... a little boy woke up Friday morning, ate breakfast and grabbed his Spider Man backpack on a crisp December morning while a little girl grabbed her Justin Bieber backpack and they both kissed their parents for what would be the last time...

 

Time to wake up... No more sleeping to the realities of right and wrong.

 

 

 

 

The children and faculty that lost their lives