11 years ago yesterday, I was at a Hyundai dealer in Raleigh getting my car serviced. Having just moved to the area in November, I had been in North Carolina for barely a month. Detective Munch, my oldest son - my only son, at that point - had just turned two.
We were giving a new state a shot, the holiday season was just starting, and in some ways, the world seemed hopeful.
And then, back north, in the state I grew up in, where my family still lives, a bunch of children not much older than my own were shot and killed at school.
You might be wondering why I didn’t post this yesterday, on the actual anniversary of the tragedy in Newtown.
Well, for one thing, my newsletter comes out on Fridays, and I figured that was close enough. But to be totally honest, the main reason I didn’t write about it yesterday is that I didn’t remember it was the anniversary. I wasn’t reminded until late Thursday afternoon, when I finally saw a post (on Threads) that referenced it.
It took me all day to see something, and the cynical side of me suspects that’s because I’m not the only person who forgot. I am on social media a lot, and it took almost the entire day before I saw anything about it. (It may also be because I mostly avoid Twitter these days, lest I run across a post from the piece of shit that calls Sandy Hook a hoax or from the pathetic edgelord who’s turned the entire platform over to hate merchants. )
The fact that few people seemed to say anything about it is sad, but it’s nowhere near as sad as the fact that it’s been over a decade and our politicians still haven’t done anything about it.
When we moved to Raleigh, I was worried about culture shock. I’ve lived in the northeast (CT, Boston, Brooklyn) almost all of my life, and my values - and personality - don’t exactly align with those of the stereotypical South. Thankfully, the Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill Triangle is about as educated and liberal (that combination is not a coincidence) as that area gets, and I was able to avoid much of that clash. But it wasn’t for us, and we would be back in Brooklyn a little over a year after I watched the news in the Hyundai dealership’s waiting room.
Mom and Buried and I tried something new, and when it failed, we reverted. That’s understandable, right? No shame there; at least we gave it a shot.
What’s less understandable is the fact that 11 years after Sandy Hook, we’ve never tried anything at all in terms of gun control and gun reform and gun safety, and we just continue to fail in all the same ways. Which is as shameful as it gets.
As the sentiment goes: if a bunch of elementary school children getting slaughtered doesn’t force change, nothing will. And, despite dozens (if not hundreds) of mass shootings in the 11 years since the unfathomable happened in a small town in Connecticut, nothing has.
Hug Your Kids
I wrote this the day it happened. I may have written while sitting in the dealership, watching the news reports. This is something I try to always remember.
I joke a lot about how difficult parenting is and how much of a hassle children can be, but there’s not a parent among us who wouldn’t rather suffer 5000 more tantrums than endure what the parents of the lost in Newtown are going through today.
My heart goes out to all of them.
Hug your kids.