14 December 2012, Day 192

There is a poem by Pablo Neruda that I count among my favorites. The title is “Explico algunas cosas”/ “I Explain a Few Things.” It is a poem about war, an elegy for the beautiful everyday world of tree-lined streets and houses with boxes of geraniums in the windows: the beautiful, the everyday, that burned to ashes in a brutal war. The passage from the poem that has always haunted me is this:

y por las calles la sangre de los niños

corría simplemente, como sangre de niños.

and through the streets the blood of the children

ran simply, like children’s blood.

It’s a gut-wrenching image, one that defies the possibility of metaphor, an idea so terrible that it can only be compared to itself.

The blood of the children ran in America today. Again. But we have no civil war, no brutal dictator to blame for it. We have only ourselves. Each time a horror like this happens we are stunned in disbelief. Each time. And then we are told not to “politicize” it by bringing up the elephant in the room: America’s addiction to guns. I know a few things about addiction, and one of them is that an addict is capable of phenomenal acts of denial in order to avoid facing a truth that would necessitate a change of behavior. And so America joneses at the very thought of the government “taking away our guns.” After all, “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” And on and on.

What happened today was inconceivable, but it isn’t even rare anymore. How many children have been shot and killed on the streets of Chicago this year? How many have died in your city? And on and on. All day today I could not even grieve; all I could feel was anger and frustration that we keep letting the same thing happen again and again and, like all good addicts, find twisted ways to explain it. God let it happen, claim Bryan Fischer and Mike Huckabee, because He’s pissed that the children aren’t allowed to pray in school. So he killed them. Way to go, God! If the teachers had guns, claim others, they could have stopped it.  Yes, because what could possibly go wrong with routinely having a loaded gun in a classroom? But if you even try to respond to this lunacy, you're accused of politicizing a tragedy.

Yesterday, i had decided that i would go to Millennium Park this evening for the caroling. My heart wasn’t in it today, but I knew I wouldn’t get another chance this holiday season, so I did. I was startled to see life going on as usual: happy crowds skating at the ice rink, others gathered around the Bean for the singing. A gospel choir from the Acme Baptist Church was there to lead the carolers. But before they began the usual Christmas tunes, they paused for a moment of silence, then sang “I Got an Angel Watching over Me,” a beautiful spiritual that I believe was written by the leader of the group, Arthur Sutton. It was so moving and comforting that it soothed my soul. I didn’t stay for the rest of the caroling; this was enough.

I leave you tonight with a few images of the pleasures of a winter evening in the Christmas season, images of life going on. I offer you these images, not to assure you that everything is all right, that we can say our prayers for the dead and then get back to business as usual. Instead I offer them to remind you and me and all of us of how precious life is in its simple pleasures and joys, of how we should treasure it, and nurture it through a return to sanity and civility.