We Are A Sick Country

Thing One plays for a premier league team in Newtown, CT.

He practices at a field with 26 newly planted trees around it.  The parking lot of that field was a staging area for the news media last December. After I drop him off, I drive to a Starbucks with wi-fi to do some work.  I drive by the entrance to the school, which is barricaded off about 100 yards down the main road, with some Jersey barriers under some fir trees in the gathering shade of early evening.  The fire station where some of the families gathered to wait for children who would never come home is right there, strangely small after seeing it in TV.  Across the road is a plywood shrine with 26 hearts and the spray painted invocation: "Pray for the families".  Every other car has a green ribbon.

Twice a week, my son and I dip the tips of our toes into a sorrow I can't comprehend nor do I want to.

So to the NRA, who successfully recalled at least one legislator in Colorado for passing common sense gun safety legislation, I say this:

You are the servants of Moloch, to whom the ancient Canaanites sacrificed children.  Every breath that you take is a breath you have stolen from children across this country.  This weekend, in Yellowstone National Park, a three year old child was killed with her father's handgun.  Because freedom.

We have had a remarkably open and productive debate over the past week about whether or not to use deadly force to protect international conventions about the use of chemical weapons.  But we are afraid to have such a debate when it comes to the hundreds of children each year who are fed to Moloch, sacrifices to the god who devours children.  And when that debate is joined, you work to force out of office those who would join it.

You are a cancer on the body politic.  You have warped our commonwealth to the fears and needs of a paltry, craven few who cling to cold iron more than they cling to the lives of children.

You are slaves to the Cult of the Gun.  And as a better man than me said about another cult in the service of slavery:

“In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky-her grand old woods-her fertile fields-her beautiful rivers-her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong; When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten; That her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing.”