Beauty is Imperfection

I haven’t posted recently, and don’t really want to post about the Newtown, Conn. shootings today, in which 20 elementary school children were massacred by a gunman while they were trapped in their classroom (along with seven adults). But I also think silence has its own kind of disrespect. So I’ll say only that I’ve been too sick in my stomach today to want to put my feelings into words. It’s something fatherhood has done to me–made me feel protective of every person’s children, since mine could have just as easily been harmed as theirs. To open yourself up to that kind of love for a being, to feel protective of that being, responsible for that being, and know that it’s possible he or she can be taken away from you in a meaningless burst of violence, is almost impossible to reconcile to logic. It makes you want to shut down, give up, go away. Take your child and run and hide.

I am being told that to politicize this patently political problem today is unseemly. That is the conspicuous pile of bullshit being spread by a certain rights lobby, whose defensive posture and rhetoric says more than I ever could about them. I could go on for pages about that. But lucky for them I don’t feel like it. I feel only like being with my small, hopeful, innocent son, holding him, watching over him and spending the next few days trying to remind myself that my plan was to bring him into a good world.  Would that it were always true.