I'm writing this on Memorial Day, when we are supposed to set aside things and think about those who gave their lives for this country. It's a good idea. We should do that.
But a new list of those dying before their time is growing. They were, and are, children. They get taken from us by lonely psychopaths with, mostly, automatic weapons. We need to set aside a day, now, to consider that, and to consider why that has happened.
I've lost step with the Catholic Church, largely because I've stepped away from it. But the other day, I recalled that somewhere in its liturgy, there is a day devoted to innocent children dying for no good reason.
That would be the Feast of the Holy Innocents, on December 28. If you recall the basis of the birth of the savior of the world in a little stable outside of Bethlehem, it is because King Herod was after him. To be thorough, he decided that the oldest child of each family be sacrificed so that, in the end, he'd get the one he was after.
Governments, when acting purposefully, can be quite thorough. Of course, it didn't work. But nobody kept track of the numbers of innocents that did get murdered. So the church decided that the best it could do is recognize the barbarity with a separate day devoted to the victims.
I like that calendar selection, between Christmas and New Year's. It's a quiet time. Nobody expects anything big to develop then. There aren't a lot of 'other things' going on. All the better to set a day like that aside.
Not that anybody has recognized it much. But maybe we should recalibrate that day, now that dozens of innocent children are getting slaughtered, for no good reason, usually in our schools.
For we need that now. We need to remind ourselves of the uselessness of what is going on, the utter nihilism, the meaninglessness, of rubbing out lives barely begun. We need to remind ourselves of the wanton devastation wrought to communities which only wanted to get on with their lives.
The only thing we've good at regarding those tragedies, up until now, is the determination of getting beyond them, to pretend that life merely goes on. We haven't, and it isn't. That continues to haunt.
So we need a day to remind us. All kinds of good may come from it. Maybe.
Maybe people will come to see, once again, that schools need funding to protect themselves.
Maybe people will see, again, that like when they attended, schools are places of energy and fun and accomplishment, places where kids can get hold of themselves in mass self-actualization.
Maybe they will see that schools are largely good places, even if they aren't perfect.
Maybe they will remind themselves of the carnage, of the atrocity amidst which we live on increasingly borrowed time. Maybe they will tell themselves that something has to be done about it that will make some of us uncomfortable, but at least they will still remain alive to feel that way. Better that than riddled with bullets designed to make short work of us.
Now, what exactly to call it? You shouldn't bogart a name like that from a church. Besides, assuming that all the kids were holy would be presumptuous--though those of us believing in an afterlife would like to think that their souls went to a good place, undeserved that their deaths were.
We have to call it something that connects their murders to the devices that delivered their ghastly, bloody ends, something that reminds us of the guns that sent them there. At the moment, I'm not that clever. Something to do with helplessness, though. That strikes the right tone.
But the date matters. It must be a date that dovetails with other thinking presently going on. It must revitalize, at least for that moment, the place from whence we have sprung. It must remind of us work we must yet do.
The anti-abortionists gather to protest on January 22, the date that the Supreme Court decision of Roe v. Wade was made (though I wonder whether they will any longer now that that decision seems destined to be overturned). They unite to mourn lives not begun. I wonder if they will approve of a celebration of the end of lives barely begun--or that somehow, they can ascertain a difference.
Maybe that should be the name for the national memorial to those slaughtered in school shootings. We should gather there, in a place otherwise uncelebrated, in western South Dakota (see the previous blog), on December 28. We should make sure the news media sends someone there.
Maybe it doesn't yet surpass, say, September 11 for the sheer numbers of those slaughtered. But it will. Count on it. There have been twenty-seven school shootings so far this year in the U.S., including a curiously underreported one in a fairly tony part of Washington, DC that I bet you don't know about, one that could have brought at least as much devastation as that of Uvalde, Texas, one that I will write about soon.
Three thousand dead at the World Trade Center? That won't seem like a very big number at all. And we will never, ever be through with this, either. Never. The number will grow with a grinding inevitability that will crush us beneath it.
I have no idea what such a thing would look like, nor would I make any attempt to design it. My skills, such as they are, are limited to words on a printed page. But the more I write, the more it calls out. The more they call out; the innocents.
Who's with me on December 28? Somehow, I don't think the Catholics, as devoted as some of them are to ruining public schools, are going to mind much.
Because they're all innocent, all the dead kids. I'm betting none of them would have hurt a flea. And now they're gone, violently, despicably, ridiculously.
Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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