I can't, I can't, I can't take it
This is a time to smile, I can't fake it
Please allow me the chance now to break it down
It's not snow, it's rain coming down
And the lights are cool, but they burn out
And I can't pull off the cheer
Not this year, not this year
Not this year
~Aly and AJ, "Not This Year"
When I was a little girl, Christmas was such a big deal in my house. We'd all go and get the tree together--chop it down ourselves, of course; we couldn't just buy one--and decorate it while listening to Christmas music, the most eclectic mix of songs you could possibly imagine--Annie Lennox, Whitney Houston, Tom Petty, Darlene Love, Bruce Springsteen, you name it, we listened to it. We'd bake Christmas cookies, sugar cookies, the kind you get to decorate, and I'd make a gingerbread house. There was almost always snow, and my dad and I would go sledding and then come home and wrap presents together. When I got old enough, I could pick out presents for my parents and other family, and sometimes pay for them--and we'd have little present-wrapping parteis. We even made our own ornaments out of Polymer clay. And on Christmas morning, there would be the most incredible presents under the tree. One year there was a brass bed for my American girl doll (which I'd just gotten for my birthday a month earlier). One year there was a play tea party cart that I'd begged for. One year, a little Hogwarts castle, complete with Polly Pocket-sized Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley. One year there was a beautiful bronze-colored electric guitar, just the right size for a short little twelve-year-old. I believed in Santa until I was almost a teenager.
And if you'd told me then that someday I would possess the knowledge that out there, in my country, there was a young man my age who had the capacity to take a handful of deadly weapons, walk into an elementary school, and shoot seven-year-old children,
multiple times, at Christmastime, I wouldn't believe you. I wouldn't
want to believe you. I wouldn't want to think that anyone had that capacity.
He was my age. That boy was my age. He could, just as easily, have been someone I went to school with. He could have gone to my college, gone to my high school, gone to my boarding school. I could have known him. There is every chance that, right now, at my college, there is a twenty-year-old man who could so easily take a gun, walk into my classroom in the middle of a lecture, shoot my teacher, and then turn on me--cold-faced, no emotion in his eyes, no remorse, no fear--and shoot me, multiple times, in the chest. Watch me die, no regrets, and walk away. I wouldn't be able to do anything about it except bleed.
I can't get that out of my head. I keep seeing, from the point of view of a six-year-old, a man walking into my classroom like that. I keep hearing a little voice saying something that I read in one of the articles about the shooting--"I don't want to die, I just want Christmas, I just want to have Christmas." That would be me. That's always me. I'm the one who always says, "Not yet, not yet, not yet." If I die of old age, God willing, I'll be on my deathbed saying, "Not yet, I want to see the turn of the century." I can't imagine being six years old, in school, just before winter break, and being in the position of saying, "I just want Christmas."
Six years old.
Six. Fucking. Years. Old.
In my lifetime I have seen cruelty. I have seen what I thought was the maximum capacity for human violence. Wars, both started by us and ended by us. The Holocaust. Genocide. My Lai. The picture of the little Vietnamese girl running naked down the street, her body covered in Napalm burns. All of those things they teach you in history class, all those situations where Americans were allegedly the heroes or, if your teacher is honest, the worst villains.
Then, those ones closer to home. The things I watched on the news with my mother. The Columbine massacre. 9/11--I'd been studying World War II, and I was so afraid that day that my father would have to go off to war, just like the men drafted back in the 1940s. The Virginia Tech massacre, the Aurora shooting, which I wrote about a few months ago--I thought, until yesterday, that I'd seen it all.
I was wrong.
I could not have imagined this. But my mind keeps trying to make up for that,
making me picture it.
This Christmas, families in Connecticut will take down their Christmas lights, which they put up just for their children. The presents bought for their children will never be opened. Christmas cookies will not be made or eaten. Neighbors will offer sympathy, but it will be useless. Families who took for granted that they'd be able to take their children to their grandparents' house for Christmas dinner will sit in the living room and hold each other, crying, wishing like mad that they could have just one more day with the child they lost.
I can't cry. Not yet. Not about this. Earlier I cried during a fight with my dad. The tiniest little thing set me off--I couldn't think why. Now I know. I want to let this out somehow, but I can't. Writing usually helps. Not now.
As a Christian, one of the first things you are taught is to forgive. And usually, I can. Over time, my fury at the Aurora shooter has slowly begun to fade away. I'll never stop thinking what he did was horrible, but I no longer hate him, I'm no longer curious about him--but I'll never stop wishing that people like him didn't exist.
But I will never,
ever forgive the man--the man my age, the man who could so easily be my classmate, perhaps even someone in my group of friends--who went into that school, and murdered those children.
This man is a monster. He is not the sci-fi kind, not the beast from 20,000 fathoms, not an alien life form from some far-flung planet. He walks among us. He
is us. The man who took a gun into a school and murdered twenty children is human. He is beyond the evil of the antagonist of
Psycho. But even Alfred Hitchcock would think twice before making a movie about a man like this.
While I will continue to pray for peace, and pray for the families who were torn apart by this monster, I won't fool myself into thinking that just prayer will be enough. Obama's visit to Newtown won't be enough. Watching the shooter die by a thousand flaming arrows wouldn't be enough. When your child is ripped away from you, nothing is enough--I haven't had children, but I know that if I were to die the way the children in Newtown died, murdering the murderer would not be enough for my mother.
I'm not in the habit of invoking Hell. But in this case, I don't think anything else is worthy of the perpetrator of this crime.
So, Adam Lanza, I do not feel curiosity about you. I am afraid of you. I am afraid that more like you walk the earth, and even more afraid because I know that my fear is justified. I don't want to know more about you. I don't care what made you commit this crime. I don't want you to stand trial. I'm glad you killed yourself, because it means I won't have to read articles about you standing trial and defending your actions. Is that awful of me? Perhaps it is--but I feel my minor crime of being thankful for your elimination pales in comparison to the fact that you took twenty-eight lives, twenty of whom had barely begun to live.
And I'll pray for your victims, I'll pray for their families, I'll pray for their friends and neighbors and loved ones. But the one thing I will not pray for, is for God to have mercy on your soul. For what you did, I think you deserve every punishment He gives you and beyond.
