Ten years later

Most of them would be in high school.

They should have had their first dates, first crushes, first loves.

Some of them should still be in the classroom doing the profession they loved. 

And at least one should still simply be a mother. 

But because of the actions of a deeply disturbed young man, 26 people died ten years ago today at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. 

Six were adults who worked at the schools:  the principal, teachers, and teacher assistants.  A seventh adult, the mother of the shooter (I will not name the shooter; he killed himself at the school), died at home, the first victim of the massacre.  

The other twenty were first-graders.

Let that sink in.

First-graders, with single digits showing their ages. 

What can I say that hasn't already been said about Sandy Hook? 

It remains the deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school. 

When you say "Sandy Hook" and "Columbine", people know immediately what you are talking about, and it is not simply a place name. They are names with horrible connotations of blood, of murder, of screaming parents and other adults, of first responders who probably still suffer from nightmares and other symptoms of PTSD.  

And as if the Sandy Hook parents weren't suffering enough, they had to endure the outrageous claims that "Sandy Hook was a hoax." When I was on the hunt for a conservative alternative to Facebook, I was part of such a group and when I mentioned Sandy Hook, the person said, "No one died at Sandy Hook. Show me proof that people died at Sandy Hook." 

I will not name the person that spent the most time tormenting the Sandy Hook families, except to say that every cent this person has should be divided among the families that lost loved ones. 

Seven adults and twenty children died a decade ago. 

Ten years later, nothing has changed.

Instead, we are society that has grown numb to mass shootings. Our ice thaws a bit when we hear about a school shooting. We scream our outrage, we offer our thoughts and prayers, we demand changes to gun laws . . . and then all the feelings die down until the next mass shooting. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What can I say that hasn't been said? Rachel still weeps for her children and cannot be comforted (see Jeremiah 31:15). 

What solutions can I offer that have not been offered?

Like a friend of mine said after yet another mass shooting, "I'm out of ideas." 

The only thing I know to do is remember the victims:  

Nancy Lanza

Rachel D'Avino

Dawn Hochsprung

Anne Marie Murphy

Lauren Rousseau

Mary Sherlach

Victoria Leigh Soto

Charlotte Bacon

Daniel Barden

Olivia Engle

Josephine Gay

Dylan Hockley

Madeleine Hsu

Catherine Hubbard

Chase Kowalsky

Jesse Lewis

Ana Marquez-Greene

James Mattioli

Grace McDonnell

Emilie Parker 

Jack Pinto

Noah Pozner

Caroline Previdi

Jessica Rekos

Avielle Richman

Benjamin Wheeler

Allison Wyatt

In memoriam, December 14, 2012.

May their memory be a blessing.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.

The power of memory through buildings

Robb Elementary School, the Uvalde, Texas school that was the site of a horrific shooting, will meet the wrecking ball. 

Uvalde’s mayor, Don McLaughlin, said, “You can never ask a child to go back or a teacher to go back in that school ever.” 

Years earlier, Sandy Hook Elementary, the scene of another horrific massacre, was also demolished.

I can understand why. Who can walk into a building where you witnessed wholesale slaughter and act like everything is back to normal? 

You can’t.

I’ve never been a victim of a shooting, nor have I witnessed one. 

I can, however, tell you of my experience with a building where I experienced abuse.

It was a church building in Tallahassee, Florida. I was baptized in their baptistry on November 11, 1981, at age 18. For five years, from the ages of 18 to 23, I attended church in that building at least three to four times a week, excluding vacations from school.

To this day, I can still visualize the place as it looked in the 1980’s: the front door, which I didn’t use very often because it faced the street but not a parking lot, the side door that did lead to the sanctuary; the back door that led to the fellowship hall and to a staircase that would take you to the sanctuary. I can wander through that building in my mind and picture events that went on there, times we sang, the folding chairs we sat on in the fellowship hall — or the times we sat on the floor during our Friday night devotionals. 

I can remember the downstairs hallway where the nursery was on one side and the classrooms for the older kids were on the other. I’ve been in those classrooms, holding babies or trying to corral kids during children’s church.

Upstairs, I sat through sermon after sermon; Sunday School lesson after Sunday School lesson; special speakers, retreats, weddings, and other events. 

I was never raped in that building, nor did anyone physically assault me there. 

But I was subject to spiritual abuse there: listened to sermons and classes where we were pushed to do more, where “the spiritual” were defined as those who converted the most people, those who worked full-time for the church, and/or those that chose to give up everything for missions. If you did not have the numbers, you were second-class. 

We took away lessons from that building that said, go invite total strangers to church; go knock on people’s doors and invite them to a church service or a Bible study; submit to your leaders, do not question why they are doing what they are doing and do not argue with them. You must have a discipleship partner and confess everything to them. You must have a “quiet time” daily where you study the Bible and pray and you need to be ready to tell your discipleship partner what you were studying. If you’re not doing it every day, the partner is allowed to “speak the truth in love” with a loud, harsh voice asking you if you really love God, because if you did, you would be inviting people and having your daily “quiet times”. 

I left Tallahassee for good in 1986, and I went back to that building at least once. 

The last time I visited that building was 1994. I was 30 years old. 

I didn’t enter the building; it was during a weekday and I’m sure the doors were locked. But I walked around the building, in the back parking lot where I climbed out of the car of whoever was giving me a ride that day, past the windows that let light into the sanctuary, past the back door that led to the fellowship all, past the parking area near the Red Cross building next door.

And then I got to the front of the building . . . and my legs started to shake. I could not move them. I was close to the church office, and part of my fear was wondering, is there anyone there that knew me when I was a member here? And if there is, would they recognize me? 

I tried to make myself walk in front of the building.

I could not.

In order to walk in front of that church building, I had to cross the street. And even then, my legs still shook. My body remembered what had happened to me as the result of attending that church — the demands to share your faith, to attend every event, including baby and bridal showers and weddings of people you didn’t know, being rebuked for not being “out of yourself”, the constant probing for sin, the dating rules which included mandatory double dating and, I suspect, being told who you should and shouldn’t date. And if you were a woman, you were “encouraged” to accept a date, even if you weren’t too crazy about the guy who was asking you out.

All of this was done in the name of God. 

Spiritual abuse is very hard to describe. Everything I listed above — quiet times, dating, relationships, sharing your faith — are good things. Pursuing a relationship with God is a good thing. Getting to know Jesus is a very good thing. 

But infuse it with the demands to perform in a certain way, with the expectation to become someone’s idea of what a Christian should be, and these very good things then become weaponized. 

I finally walked in front of the church, even though I had to cross the street to do it, said my good-byes to it, and caught a city bus back to the hotel I was staying at. 

I had this reaction to a building where I was never physically assaulted, never raped, never shot or shot at, and never saw anyone assaulted or shot. 

Can you imagine the reaction that the people present at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022 would have if they went back to the building where their classmates and their teachers were shot and killed? Where a student smeared herself with blood and played dead to keep from being shot? Where police waited for nearly an hour before going in? 

If I had to cross a street with shaking legs to pass a building where I was not physically assaulted but only subject to spiritual abuse, I can only imagine the reaction that anyone present at Robb Elementary on that horrible day would have. 

The power of a building to evoke memory is palpable.

I don’t blame Uvalde for wanting to get rid of Robb Elementary.

Just my. 04, adjusted for inflation.