In the past couple of weeks,
I’ve had the privilege of watching over my children in quite a time now, or
just observe them since they’re a young adult and a teen too anxious to grow up
who impress on me they don’t need me to watch over them: kids these days. Pearl
and I have been battling over whether there’s value in living together when we
do almost surely well separately. Accustomed, we don’t treat the issue as pressing
now as we did in the beginning.
Kashmere being the 19-year old
that she is preoccupies herself with studies, but mostly adoring her boyfriend,
to be blunt. Anne, on the other hand, even as I see her dodging my suggestions
against grownup girl stuff (you know what I’m saying: make up; lipstick, etc.),
is childishly glued to koreanovelas. Both seem oblivious to what’s going
on around them.
The news of Sandy Hook
Elementary School massacre where 20 children no older than 5, and 6 adults
senselessly lost their lives to a heavily armed Lunatic named Adam Lanza,
somehow makes me thankful my children aren’t as news buff as many of their age.
I can’t really tell the value of them knowing or not knowing the incident,
although I am sure they’d be hard put to avoid it as it’s in almost every nook
and cranny of news channel and space.
The horror of it directly and
strikingly challenges a father’s idea of protecting his children.
I feel strongly for our
America-based colleagues at work, who lost their loved ones in this menacing
tragedy: Dean Pinto who lost his son, Jack; William Sherlach who lost his wife,
Mary; Paul Minella who lost his niece, Grace; and I breathe hope and solace in
R.J. Fressola’s wife, Liesl, who teaches at the school and is among those who
survived.
The bigger problem is this is
becoming terrifyingly routine to America: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, and
now Connecticut. Schools drawing shooters of innocent adults and kids alike
who, sadly, have to die because they are at the wrong place when something
wrong ticked in one’s mind.
I know whatever is causing this
blood thirst could be as validly mysterious as any science prior to
breakthrough. But we know that males are mostly involved in these, and we also
know that guns are instrumental in the mass deaths. Sadly, America is
obstinately attached to their constitutional right to bear arms, and to the
elation of the gun industry and lobbyists, who continue to make billions of
dollars off the illusion that it’s inherently American to have the right to
bear arms.
Unfortunately, it’s way past
the issue of gun possession as it is now. An individual hoarding 7 firearms,
including an assault weapon or a semi-automatic rifle designed to kill a large
number of people in few squeezes of a trigger, isn’t constitutional entitlement
to protection. It is militarized thinking, influenced by how America has been
arming to the teeth its military and civilian forces.
Streets and communities of this
great nation have become battlefields awash with household artilleries that
convert instantly into massacre instruments in the hands of a deranged
individual whose detection have increasingly become difficult.
In that sense, I enjoin
everyone to be watchful on the direction of our own gun laws, lest we take the
path our all-time benefactor had trodden and we find ourselves in the same
murderous rage that beset an otherwise soberly proud America.
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