Now that all of the innocent victims have been sadly laid to rest, it’s time for me to weigh in on the Newtown shooting.
Before I launch into what may be an unpopular perspective on this tragedy, I say a quiet prayer for those whose lives were cut short, especially all the young children who weren’t even old enough to experience hostility, or to hold a grudge, or to feel the need to seek revenge for some perceived wrong. And I say a quiet prayer for all their innocent counterparts in other parts of the world, far removed from the suburbs of Connecticut. The children of Syria, caught up in a civil war; the Palestinian and Israeli children, the children of Mali, of Kenya and Darfur, of Pakistan and Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq, caught in the crossfire of conflicts not of their making. The children in the inner cities of Boston, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles… caught in the crossfire of gang violence, living in the parallel life of the ghetto in America’s third world. For in my heart, there is no distinction between American children and Muslim children and Israeli children and Palestinian children and African children. They are all children. Our children. The future of our species. All of them.
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