Honoring the Victims of Sandy Hook

Today marks one week since the Sandy Hook school massacre in Connecticut. 

There will be a moment of silence and the bells in houses of worship will toll 26 times – one for each victim - at 9:30 am.

Outside of a few Junior League girlfriends who have family and friends there, I do not have a direct connection and to Newton. 

The only “link” is a moniker: our Garden State home sits atop nearby Sandy Hook beach. 

Now, every time I look out at that gorgeous seascape vista, I am reminded of the other Sandy Hook.  Every time I see the sign for the beach – which has been closed since Superstorm Sandy – I cry – for everything “Sandy” and what she’s ripped from us.

And yet, the shootings dominate our world, my world.

I am emboldened to write about this Sandy Hook after reading a fellow food blogger, The Sassy Radish http://www.sassyradish.com/2012/12/on-newtown/

Olga wrote thoughtfully and sincerely and captured much of what I have been afraid to write. Politics is usually avoided when writing of gardens and food. (Although even that seems to be changing.) She quotes Thomas Lynch.

I commented that we need to brave.  We need to have this conversation and not be bullied into accepting a status quo – that I daresay diminishes all of us. 

We are all victims here.

It’s often said that you can gauge a society by the way it treats its elders and its young.  If we allow these people-killing guns to go unregulated then we are doomed as a good society. 

It seems appropriate to reference the idiom: Fool me once, shame on you; Fool me twice, shame on me.

We cannot continue to be fooled into thinking guns don’t kill people. This will happen again.

We cannot allow the gun industry to sell us this horror just to fill their wallets.

I’ve heard it said “that guns don’t kill people, people do.  Guns are tools.”

Yes. Now we need to take the bad gun tools out of the hands of people who pull triggers.  They don’t know how to use the tools…

Regulate the gun “shows.” And tax both the guns and the bullets.

Let’s have this conversation about regulations.

See what happens when we don’t? Don’t look the other way.

Let’s protect our children. We need to bear witness.

Peace on earth, especially this time of year.