Post Apocalypse

A week ago today this country suffered a loss so tragic, so utterly senseless, so universally painful, that it will NEVER be erased from our collective memory. The massacre of twenty children and seven adults on a bright December day in 2012 was as life altering for this country as any apocalypse might have been.

For a week now, we've seen the seemingly endless photographs of the children and teachers who lost their lives. Those twenty-six photographs stretch out impossibly to infinity in one's mind. We have listened to arguments for and against gun control, we have watched as sales of guns and, God save us, bullet proof back-packs soar. We have endured endless media personalities shoving microphones and cameras in tormented faces, just trying to get that one definitive sound bite or image. We have not been able to turn our eyes away from this trainwreck, not even for a moment.

It is time we stop looking back, and look forward as a country to what the real cause of this tragedy is and was and will be if we don't fix it. Like old Ebenezer, we need to be dragged kicking and screaming in our nightcaps into the past, present and future of this country's problem with acknowledging, accepting and treating mental illness and personality disorders.

The shooter at Sandy Hook had problems. He had deep seated issues that his mother had a difficult time discussing with friends and family and perhaps facing herself. And, please, this is not meant to place blame with her, it is just to point out that we have always, and are still, hiding our mentally ill like they are somehow shameful reflections on us as parents, and on a larger scale, our society.

My own family struggles with mental illness. Suicide has wrapped its ugly black grip around us, and every Christmas for the past several years we have all had to struggle through what the consequences of one person's act has done to us as a group.

Until we can come together as a society and throw back the curtain of shame we instinctively shroud our mentally ill citizens in, we will continue to be shocked and devastated by acts of desperate violence like those that took place last week.

It isn't guns, or gun laws...it is facing up to the fact that some of us need help and/or need to be institutionalized. That it isn't shameful...it is just a fact.