Sunday, December 15, 2013

ANNIVERSARIES

     It's my second blogiversary, more or less. I started this blog on December 19, 2011, four days after my Dec. 15th birthday, to announce to the world my despair with getting horrifyingly old yet never getting any of my books published, and to provide myself with a writing outlet so that I could experience something other than feeling like I was shouting down an empty well.
     Two years have passed, and I've come to love this blog like the true friend it's proven to be. I'm still not published - that hasn't changed. It's my birthday that has changed irrevocably for me instead. Last year it arrived the day after the Sandy Hook school shooting in Newtown, and every year for the rest of my life, it will be inextricably bound up for me with that event. Gone is the luxury of spending my birthday wallowing in self-pity because I haven't achieved everything I've wanted in life. My children are alive and healthy. I've never had to rip out a piece of my soul as the result of kissing my kindergartener goodbye for a few hours, sending him or her off to school, and then learning later that day what goodbye really means.
     Kindergarteners. Babies just learning to tie their shoes and zip their jackets. Gone for a year and a day on this birthday of mine... and so on... and so on, through the years. Now, my birthday brings me new responsibilities, because although I've changed, America's gun culture hasn't. Our federal gun laws haven't. The NRA's ludicrous suggestion that the Second Amendment's reference to a "well-regulated militia" means that virtually any person in America who wants a gun should be able to get one almost effortlessly hasn't changed. One year after Newtown, we have learned exactly nothing, and the school shootings keep coming.
     When I told my husband tonight that I'm going to donate the birthday money that both my mother and my mother-in-law gave me to Americansforresponsiblesolutions.org, he told me that I'm very generous. He could not be more wrong. What I am is very, very fortunate, unlike so many parents across this country whose children one day happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
     I feel helpless and infuriated about Newtown and all the other school shootings. I feel helpless and infuriated about the daily "gun fails" around the country that David Waldman, as a true public service, tweets about at @KagroX. A sickening number of them involve small children finding their parents' unsecured guns and accidentally killing their siblings or playmates.
     I am not generous. I really believe that my December 15th birthday has laid a responsibility on my shoulders, and I am trying to do what little I can to meet it.

5 comments:

  1. We live is a very sad world, Susan :( I had a similar experience, my 6th birthday being the day after JFK's assassination. I was too young to truly understand what that meant, but felt the weight of it in the air. Your memory of the horror in Newtown is much clearer and more profound. It's all awful :(

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    1. Thanks for understanding, Donna. If a bloodbath like Newtown didn't lead to meaningful change, I really don't want to imagine what it would take.

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  2. Oh boy, I feel exactly as you do, and I applaud you for saying it all out loud here. Here! Hear! When the majority of Americans want better, stronger gun laws, yet Congress does not pass them, where is our VOICE? And what does this say about American values? I hope that people like you continue to yell out loud - THIS IS NOT RIGHT, and WE NEED TO MAKE GUN CHANGES!

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    1. Thank you so much for your support, Pam. We can't stop yelling out loud until something gives. Maybe 2014 will be the year.

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