After Newtown: Why I Won't Join a Prayer Chain

I have one nephew, a four year-old boy who is the most precious thing in my life. He is my baby sister's child, and my parents' only grandchild. He is the hope of my family going forward.Two days before the evil unleashed on Newtown, I attended a Christmas pageant at his Catholic elementary school. It was an adorable rendition of gospel readings by older children and songs from the younger ones. There was a stage in a large, airy gymnasium where the children held hands and sang. They were led to the stage by their teachers, in unsteady columns, through the rows of chairs packed with beaming parents holding cell phones and cameras.As I usually am at events like that, I was uneasy, and I hated it. Whether it's a generally over-active imagination or a career in the business I chose, all I could think of, from the moment I filed in and found my parents and sister, through the introduction of the children and the singing was "Dear God, this place is defenseless. What if some disgruntled spouse comes in here and..."But I banished those thoughts as well as I could, because while their subject reality was technically possible, it seemed silly and paranoid to dwell on it. And really, I eventually reasoned, how likely is it that I'll actually hear shots ring out? That I'll see wide-eyed little children being blown apart, shot through tiny chests, faces and flailing arms and legs? Screaming in terror and agony even while falling short of contemplating what's happening to them?Scary, I reasoned. And technically possible. But not at all likely. So I watched, and enjoyed, and it didn't happen. It usually doesn't, after all. Until it does. And literally 48 hours later, it did.The impact of the events of December 14, 2012 will be a long time fully manifesting. For the parents of the dead, the numbing horror-walk of the grief process is darkly blossoming among the unavoidable sounds and sights of the holiday season in a garish red and green ritual of torture. Newtown is most likely permanently wounded, its simple New England name forever lashed to terror and sorrow. One of its four elementary schools was transformed into a hideous necropolis. And now a long winter will set in, claiming more victims in divorce, suicide, breakdowns and despair.Indeed, the miserable creature who was Adam Lanza left this life by his own hand a monster, transformed from the status of a pathetic, feckless adolescent. His reasons, if they exist, may or may not emerge.But what is crystal clear is what made his transformation possible.Lanza's mother, a suburban woman in a deeply low-crime, secure and well protected area, was nevertheless a collector "for protection" of military grade firearms capable of dealing death on a massive and efficient scale. Those weapons found their way into the hands of her murderous offspring and the rest now haunts this holiday season for everyone within and far beyond Newtown.Cries for better attention to mental illness are appropriate and sorely needed. But so is the access that would-be monsters have to the tools of bone shattering, flesh wasting, machine-like human elimination. I have lost my patience for the pubescent logic of "guns don't kill people, people kill people" and the redneck paranoia of "we must guard against government tyranny." I will no longer tolerate these arguments as anything other than the foolish and dangerous nonsense they are.Neither will I join prayer-chains on social media sites, or share elaborate graphics of 26 tea lights in the shape of a heart, or images of the young, smiling dead in the bosom of Jesus. It's not that I think these things are necessarily bad. It's that I am wary of their presumed ability to make any of this less sickening and intolerable. It's that I'm suspicious of these gestures placating the creators and disseminators into a self-satisfied, faith-fuled sense that "all was done that could be done."It's because, after a year stained red by monsters abetted by an industry and political machine that snuffs out common sense as blithely as life, I am simply tired of seeing them.