Let me finish tonight with this crime in Colorado.
I, like you, love living in this free country of ours. And while I know we will continue to look for clues of how this happened and how to stop it from happening again, I wonder if some events are not just beyond our control, but well beyond. Even if we could outlaw the sale of guns, let’s face it: we’ve outlawed murder for centuries and that hasn’t stopped it.
We could check on people with mental and emotional problems but, let’s face it…there are millions of people facing them — people who live in their own private grief and confusion and pain, but don’t wreak havoc and horror on others. Besides, this is a big country. Millions of us live in our own private worlds, worlds that are good or bad but have little to do with others. We have no right as a society to go around checking in on people with all kinds of problems — mental, emotional, or simply social. They certainly don’t want us doing that, I’m sure of that.
So we push on. We face this tragedy and hope for the best, including that we are still capable in all our modern complexity and high-tech capability, that we can still feel the human hurt that comes when others we don’t know face tragedy.
I think we still do.
We are still a strong, caring society of people who can hurt when someone three thousand miles away has their life robbed from them, when someone we can tell is just like us feels the loss of someone they care about. And that is the one good thing to come of this, but it is — and do not let this pass like so many events in the news — far more important than the arguments we have here. Being united is always better than being divided. On this tragedy in Aurora, Colorado, we are surely together.
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