Newtown and Now -- Hollidaysburg, PA: Please Guide Us to a Brave, New World or All I Want for Christmas is a Suit of Armor

"And no one dared disturbed the sound of silence." Paul Simon could not have sung a more fitting song than "The Sounds of Silence," at the funeral of Victoria Soto, the brave, young teacher,who died trying to protect her young students. 

I had just sat down to right this piece, when the news story of yet another crazed gunman popped up on my computer.  This one in Pennsylvania.  Five more dead, including a woman decorating a church hall for a children's Christmas party. 

God knows, we could all use a little Christmas now, but there is a Connecticut cloud hanging over Christmas present, like a ghostly apparition. This cloud, this shadow of death, can be a key to clarity, or we can use it to blanket the truth.  The latest rampage in Pennsylvania is just adding more salt to the wounds of a very, confused, very divided country.

Hotly debated throughout the land of the free is this -- who is to blame for the Newtown tragedy?  Like the child's game of hot potato, the so-called grown-ups in this country, who hold the future of America in the palms of their hands, keep passing the buck back and forth, claiming that they or their causes, creations, or capitalistic interests have nothing to do with the mayhem and madness we have seen far too often in the dawning of this new millennium.

First and foremost, the ultimate responsibility for the massacre at Newtown lies with Adam Lanza.  His own blood, the blood of those children, his mother, and all the others, is on his hands. He planned and executed this horrific act of violence and the real truths concerning the how and why of all this, will be buried along with him. This Adam, born and bred in America, not a terrorist, mind you, but one of our own homegrown nuts, will have to answer to his maker, just as the biblical Adam had to answer to God for his fall from grace. With that said, from now until doomsday, we will all try to figure out why these senseless acts of man's inhumanity to man keep occurring, and what we should or shouldn't do, can or can not do to prevent these mass murders from happening again.  Yet each of us will be preaching to our own choirs.  From "The Sound of Silence," we could all sing in unison this verse, "People talking without speaking, People hearing without listening..."It is becoming all too apparent that exercising your right to free speech and bringing up certain inalienable rights will have people gunning for you, and not with the slow loading weapons of our forefathers, but with weapons of mass destruction that can wipe out a classroom of innocent schoolchildren in minutes. Consequently, people are scared silent.  If you write about gun control, hundreds of angry people post nasty, comments about you and what you have to say.  All this anonymously, of course.  So much for the courage to put your name where your mouth is.  This is just a new form of bullying, cyber-style.

The fact that people are stockpiling guns right now in response to this tragedy is frightening. Are we all becoming a bunch of Survivalists?  From all accounts, Nancy Lanza was a Survivalist, and we all know how that turned out. Humans are first and foremost mammals, yes, animals, and each and every day we have to rise above our own animal natures and listen to our higher consciousness.  Does "survival of the fittest" mean, he who has the most guns wins?  No, "survival of the fittest" means listening to divine guidance and using your intelligence in your quest to live a long and productive life.  That is how the quick-thinking, 6-year-old girl survived the slaughter at Sandy Hook, not by grabbing a gun, but by outwitting her killer by playing dead. 

The NRA announced their simple solution to schoolroom slayings: armed guards stationed in every school, because "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun".  There are those who claim,"Guns don't kill." Others are convinced that it's all Hollywoods fault.  Hollywood then claims that they are only giving people what they want, and even point back in time to the Greek tragedies, with their theme of vengeance, for their intelligent justification for the spilling of blood and guts in every other movie and television show.  And Hollywood further argues that it isn't their movies that are causing this mess anyway -- it's video games and mental illness.  Other says, it isn't mental illness, but the psychiatric drugs these people are on -- or off -- that is causing the rise in random mass killings. Still others  claim that it is the amount of hard drug use among our youth, including Heroin and other opiates. Other people point their fingers at the parents.  Yes, it's all their faults because they aren't showing enough tough love, or because they are sparing the rod and spoiling the child.  Still others will say spanking is the culprit; or parents aren't there enough for their kids, or they are hovering over their offspring too much, you know the helicopter parent-thing. Still others notate that it isn't the children raised in poverty that are doing these mass murders, but those raised in the land of plenty, the land of affluenza created this deadly epidemic.

I'll admit --guns don't kill people.  No, guns and ammunition,  in the hands of the human animal, kill people. And until we sort through the hundreds of other theories as to why this is happening, I, for one, believe in gun control, otherwise the fashion choice of this decade will be a well-fitted suit of armour, for you and yours. 

As we lay 2012 to rest, we will be ringing in the year 2013 with the ominous sound of a death knell.