December 14, 2012, the day a deranged monster walked into Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newton, Connecticut and massacred 20 children and 6 adults, is a day that will live forever in the seemingly never-ending chronicles of evil. As the father of four, including a kindergartener, I am heartbroken beyond words. I cannot possibly imagine what it must be like for those families.
This world we live in – we often forget that it’s evil, harsh, unforgiving. I can tell myself that horrible things happen to people every day, in every place, in every time in history since sin first entered the world by Adam, but it doesn’t make it any easier when we are confronted with evil’s most extreme forms. When Cain killed his brother out of jealousy, becoming the world’s first murderer, surely even he could not comprehend the dark places his descendants would take humanity.
Only recently have people, through technology, been able to temporarily ‘insulate’ ourselves from many of the rugged realities of this life. In olden times, throughout most of human history, life was one series of grueling events after another until you died at the ripe old age of 40 (if you were lucky). Today we live in a bubble of our own design. We lock our criminals away in massive prison complexes, our insane in institutions, our elderly and senile in nursing homes. Life is a sanitized cacophony of reality TV, sports, internet, and air conditioning. Pop culture keeps the music playing, the games going, the televisions blaring into every living room, drowning out the sounds of the real world, of the evil knocking at our doors.
Until, every so often, it hits us like a ton of bricks.
Sure, the 24 hour news cycle allows us to see the mayhem on our televisions screens, but it’s usually from a far away, safe distance. It could never happen to us, right? Even that ten car pileup on the interstate across town, or the guy murdered a few blocks down – even though we feel bad, those things don’t really ‘get’ us. But, when it’s kids that are killed or hurt, there’s still something innate, visceral, inside us that reacts passionately. We want to DO something, anything, to prevent another child from getting hurt.
And that’s when evil wins yet again, because the ‘solution’ offered by the minions of the ‘prince of this world’ would make us all disarmed victims. In the name of ‘saving the children’ they would take the liberties of free people in order to seize power and control for themselves. The sad part is, there are millions of well-meaning but gullible people who agree with them. They are like the passengers in tuxedos and evening gowns living it up on the upper decks of the Titanic just after it hit the iceberg. They’ve no idea what’s coming, and for now at least, they don’t care. In the name of ‘safety for all,’ the ‘powers-that-be,’ those ‘good folks’ who have already taken God out of the public square and driven our once-great nation into moral and economic ruin, are coming for our guns, and hell’s coming with them. And believe me, the kind of tyranny they want us all to live under will make Stalin’s archipelago look like summer camp.
This would work, but they aren’t interested in what works…
The truth is, the world is depraved – MAN is depraved – completely, totally, hopelessly. The capacity for the worst kind of evil lurks in each of us. Sure, it takes a ‘special’ kind of monster to shoot up a school (aided, no doubt, by psychotropic drugs – drugs that have their own special line of mayhem behind them!!), but the sin that resides in us is no less damning. Thankfully, that’s not the end of the story.
I don’t normally ‘preach’ on this blog, but there is only one solution to the evil that plagues mankind, and we will celebrate His birth in a few days. He came and died to atone for our sin, and He’s coming again someday to restore all things. When the rightful King comes and sits on His throne, there won’t be any more need for guns, because there won’t be any more monsters to fight. Until then, the monsters who would use this tragedy to seize power for themselves are every bit as evil as the coward who gunned down 26 people in cold blood.
May God give us the strength and the means to defend against monsters on every side, and may God comfort the families of those poor children, and all the other victims of all the other horrific tragedies we’ve never heard, seen, or read about.
Thank you for expressing this point of view. My family is stunned by the event, but worried about the outcome..