I know that this is kind of extremely random – especially because
I haven’t been able to write anything for a while but here goes. Over the
weekend I had to take some down time to try and fight off a cold. I found
myself on Facebook scrolling through random things because honestly Facebook is
great when you feel like you have to do something besides just lie there but
can’t really do much more.
In my scrolling I came across many tributes and articles
about the Sandy Hook shooting that took place in Newtown, Connecticut two years
ago. Although I don’t spend large amounts of time dwelling on it or researching
it, it has been a hard story for me. It just hits too close to home. First of
all, it’s only a few hours from where we live. Second I had just given birth to
Bear a few days before it happened so my maternal instincts were a little on
overload when I got the news and like 9/11 I will always remember that moment.
Third because I had two children off at school that day – I had kissed them
goodbye and sent them off on the bus, trusting in the simple fact that I’d see
them that afternoon. Tiger was the same age as many of those children who lost
their lives. I wept for the parents who had done the same thing I had that
Friday but had their world shattered. Lastly because I’ve been where those
Sandy Hook families have been. I’m pretty sure it was even a Friday when my
middle-school went on lockdown because a student shot and killed another
student. It shattered our innocence forever and that was when I was 12 and
there was only one victim.
As I read through the comment sections of the Sandy Hook
articles I knew I had to say something. For anyone who is blissfully unaware
there are many people now who are completely convinced that Sandy Hook never
happened and is completely a government run hoax. Those people are troll-like
trying to take over the comment sections of articles related to what happened
and prove their superior intelligence – convinced that the rest of us are
mindless fools. Sometime after the first anniversary I read an article full of
what it described as “proof” – it was full of the most ridiculous non-sense I
could have imagined. The parents were called actors because they didn’t “look
like” they could have been in a relationship with one another and they “weren’t
grieving enough”. They dared to complain that we haven’t seen the pictures of
the bodies on tv or had more film footage. These people never pause to consider
that maybe the media for once is respecting the fact that this is tragic enough
to where they should back off and respect those who died instead of showing
gruesome footage (that no one sane really wants to see and for that matter
these same people probably wouldn’t accept as authentic) and focusing only on
the most distraught people as they interview (which I can verify from personal
experience that they do). The idea of the conspiracy theorists was that it was
all just a farce to strengthen evidence against gun laws or even homeschooling.
There’s another similar story I heard recently about
Malaysian Airlines flight 117 – people who believed that it was another tragedy
that never happened. The idea was that the plane was actually the Malaysian
Airlines flight 370 that had earlier crashed into the Indian Ocean. This is
another one that struck close to home as we have good friends who had just
visited with a longtime friend that was going home on that plane. Their grief
is real. They lost a good friend who only a short time before they had laughed
with as he played with their little children.
The idea behind conspiracy theories can be interesting. It
feeds off of the concept that we know is true – there is always more to a story
than meets the eye. They are especially tempting if we can believe that we know
more about what really happened than the person next to us and can either
engage that person’s belief or start a good debate. I’m not going to say that
we shouldn’t question the reasoning behind tragic events and want to find out
the whats and the whys and get our information straight so we can find ways to
prevent further suffering. What I am saying is that at the very least we can be
decent enough to the people that are mourning to admit that they happened. I
can’t even imagine what it must be like to have strangers asking for the
pictures of my child or grandchild's tortured corpse so that they can prove
that she actually existed. Those who do are no better than the people trying to
convince us that the Holocaust never happened and deny us the chance to search
for real answers.
And for all of you people still desperately searching for a
conspiracy - how about this one – how about a group that goes around coming up
with random judgments and outright lies that make us stop believing that these horrible
things really are happening. That to me seems the most potentially harmful and
frightening one of all.
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