Everyone has something to say about the shootings in Newtown, CT last week that stole the lives of children and adults. Grief and despair caught most of us up in its maelstrom. But anger, outrage, and demands fill the voices of many.
I don’t know the answer. No one does — not entirely. We can point to our society — the same society which gave you and me our desire to do right by others and fight for peace, who gives us many more heroes than villains, yet when the worst besets us, we point heavy fingers. We blame it on pounds of steel, gunpowder, and fittings, which stand inert until acted upon. Yet we believe the name or quantity of such things inspires hateful, irrational rage in some, as though such pain and ferocity will not always find an outlet, regardless of the weapon. We can blame our health care system which has saved our loved ones’ hands, repaired our children’s broken legs, and healed our marriages. Yet few will argue it has yet to repair its own gaping wounds.
When evil occurs, we sling reproach everywhere, seeking ample cause. Perhaps because we desperately need to reach outside ourselves and determine that this could never happen in our homes, in our schools, in our lives.
Some beseech their higher power, insisting that divinity holds all the answers, despite its claims to know only one.
We lash out with our hands, our hearts ripped between beacons of safety and fear, and in the process, we do more damage. Our own desire to protect our worlds and those we love ends only in widening the path destruction makes.
Perhaps all of it is only as it can be: a wave risen on the weary, departing as its undertow pulls us from each other’s grasp.
I don’t know the answer. Grief and sorrow, admiration and grace. That is all I can feel regarding this horror. And an effort to to leave only good behind, or else nothing at all.
The post The Will of Good appeared first on Ally Bishop.
