Don't Get Me Started with Linda Sharp

'Tis The Season (Well, It's Getting Close)

The weather has turned cooler (ok, ok, COLDER in some places), the commercials have already begun, and the lights will be strung up before we know it.

 

Carols will fill the air, homes will twinkle from within as trees herald the coming of another Christmas.  And hearts will swell with excitement, joy, and peace.

Well, at least that is the version of the holidays so many of us are privileged to experience.

A lot of us, without giving it much thought - face it, when it is your every day life, you tend to take much for granted - will shop, decorate, give, receive.  Especially to our children.  Any parent knows, the gift we really look forward to on Christmas morn is the heart lifting glee we feel when we watch our child/ren opening something dearly wished for.

Every parent wants that, but sadly, not every parent can provide that.  For so many, they face this season with despair, sadness, and the heaviness of heart because they simply cannot afford a gift for their child.  Not one.  For so many, food is a gift.  Electricity for warmth is a gift. 

Over the past couple weeks I have begun receiving emails from needy families inquiring if we will again be doing our annual DGMS Yes, Virginia fund to help keep the spirit alive this Christmas.

And I have replied as I do each year - That it is my sincere wish we can, but that it depends, as it always does, on our blogmunity's ability to raise the necessary funds.

As some of our DGMSers try to give a little throughout the year, we are starting off with a couple hundred dollars already. 

If you have been around through the past years, you know the incredible moments we have created in homes across the country.  You have bought mattresses, comforters, toys, shoes, boots, coats, clothes, food, paid energy bills.  You have not simply kept Santa alive for small children, you have touched lives across the entire age spectrum.

I know, I know, Halloween is just this weekend, but before we know it we will be carving turkeys and then heading full speed towards Jingle Bells and Joy To The World.

If you can help this year, I promise you, you will be part of bringing JOY to the WORLDS of many, many people.

The page detailing our fund is always available HERE and ready to be shared with others you may know who may be in a position to chip in and change some lives.  (The instructions for safely donating via Paypal are included. )

The DGMS sleigh is empty and ready for some elves to start filling it!

Right To Lie(fe)

Look at your child.  Are they playing?  Doing homework?  Watching TV?

If you don't have one, try to imagine anyway.  A small person you love more than life itself.  Someone you would attempt to protect from any harm that may threaten him/her. 

Parental love is extremely difficult to quantify.  Its depths cannot be plumbed.  Its breadth cannot be measured in units.  It is a feeling like none other.  Knowing you would lay down your life just to insure them one more sunrise; one more smile, one more breath.

Now imagine your child is dying.  Slowly, painfully.  Dying.  You do everything possible to make it not happen.  Trips to the hospital.  Painful procedures.  You stay by their side.  You hold their hand, you wipe their tears.

Yet in the end you know that no efforts - great or small; no medical intervention or heroic procedures are going to make it not eventually happen.

Now imagine you are a person of faith.  Perhaps you are, so you don't have to imagine.  You have raised your child in what you believe.  Faith in the deity of the religion.  Sharing the stories of the faith.  And the faith's belief in what happens when we die.

Heaven.  Angels.  Jesus.  God.

Yes, the Christian faith.  The one so many of us were brought up in - maybe Catholic, maybe Baptist, perhaps Protestant, or one of the other many variations on the same theme.

As you face your child, a child you love and have taught about Heaven, is it bad to reinforce this as they endure their days?

Meet the cherubic Julianna.  She is 4 years old.  Born with an incurable neuromuscular disease, she has never known the joys of a typical childhood - running, jumping, riding a tricycle.  What she has known is a life of hospitals, being poked, enduring painful hospital procedures.

Her mother shared their struggles, pains, and most desperate fears on her blog.  She also shared the conversations they have had, some initiated by Julianna about dying, about Heaven, about angels.

Julianna is not afraid.  She is not afraid of dying.  Because she has been taught about Heaven.  And she has made it clear she doesn't want to go back to the hospital.  Her parents are ready to accede to her wishes.

As her mother writes:  Her coughing and breathing muscles are so weak that the next time she catches even a cold, the infection could settle in her lungs, where it could cause a deadly pneumonia. Her doctors believe that if they can save her under those circumstances — and that’s a big if — she will likely end up sedated on a respirator with very little quality of life.

For her candor in sharing this on her blog, she has, of course, been taken to task and harshly criticized for not only sharing stories of Heaven with her child, but for allowing a 4 year old to have a say.  Lambasted for lying to her child. 

OK, look, I am pro choice all day long, but on this?  I support a parent's right to lie(fe). 

You all know where I stand on religion.  Not a fan, but I have always said that at its best, religion can offer a sense of comfort, community, peace.

This is what I have always meant by that.

I believe in a person's right to die with dignity.  If I were terminal, in pain, quality of life rapidly diminishing, I would want the right to leave on my own terms.  I do not want to become a burden to my family.  A fleshy paperweight they are obligated to come stare at until I finally reach an expiration date.

Yes, I completely understand the limits of a 4 year old's ability to adequately grasp a concept as abstract as death and its finality. 

But I also completely understand wanting to provide said 4 year old with as much comfort and free them from as much fear as possible.  And Heaven seems like a pretty good way to do that.

Hell, old people cling to Heaven as they approach their end.  Why is it any less valid for a small child who has been raised with the concept to do so?

These parents, and so many like them, are trapped in a nightmare from which they cannot awaken.  And if faith can get them from one breath to the next?  Can help prepare them for the inevitable?  There is nothing wrong with that.  And just because others do not believe the way they do does not make them liars.

Julianna's parents are not extremists. They are not fringy lunatics relying solely on the power of prayer in the face of a disease.  They are not denying her medical care.  Julianna is in hospice care and they continue her routine treatments daily.

They are simply people of faith who have done what so many do everyday - raised their child in their faith.  Julianna isn't being sold some new bill of goods.  She is simply being provided with comfort, peace, and a cessation of fear.  She is having what she has been raised in reinforced.

Think about it.  Look at your child.  Imagine the helplessness of knowing they are slipping from your grasp.  There but for the grace of whatever you believe in, go you and I.

The older I get, I cannot say what I truly believe in.  But in looking at this precious child, and imagining this family's pain, I fervently hope there is a Heaven.

A place where sweet Julianna's angels wings and peace are waiting.

You can read more from her mother HERE.

Schooled In Tragedy ... Again

I spent yesterday morning driving north again, for a soccer game again, and to take Carson shopping again.

I arrived at the apartment, and C had not been in the car more than one minute before we heard the news.  

A mass shooting at a school again.

Again.

That word.  It wears a person down.  And in that moment I realized it is almost worn by a person because it cloaked us both, reducing our response to two heavy sighs, a setting of our jaws in anger, and then a sort of weary acceptance.

Again.

Innocent lives were brutally taken for no other reason than they were simply in the wrong place at the "right" time.

Again.

Nine families did not sleep last night, will not know rest again - at least not in the form they had come to know.  The kind where you know your loved ones are safely at home, too.  (The count is ten, which includes the gunman.)

Again.

Candles were lit in vigil.  A community mourned in the dark.

Again.

Politicians, those who do have the power to effect change, offered up rote "thoughts and prayers" on Twitter.

Again.

It will happen again.  And again.  And again. And again, and again, and again, andagainandagainandagain...

Because this is what happens when a country simply doesn't give enough of a shit to stand up and do something. 

Again.

Those of you sitting at home in your tiny towns and hamlets, much like Roseburg in Oregon, thinking, "Oh, that could never happen here"?  Think again.

Every person who ever finds themselves staring into the camera lens after a tragedy echos the same words, "I never thought it would happen here."

No one ever does.

The problem is that "Here" is a moving target. "Here" is an equal opportunity destroyer. "Here" shows no allegiance to a single location. And "Here" likes nothing better than to sneak up and surprise an entire community.

At this writing, the details are far from complete. What they do know is that 911 calls began to come in just after 10:30am.  Shots were being fired on the Umpqua Community College campus in a building in which classes were taking place.  Police arrived, engaged the shooter, and within minutes he was dead.

But not before also ending the lives of 9 completely innocent human beings and injuring far more.

Police have confirmed the dead shooter, although the investigation continues as to who he was, his background, connections, etc.  A name has been released as well as his photo. (He will get no exposure here.)

In the end, that makes no difference.

Whoever this animal was, he came, saw, deliberately unloaded his weapon(s), and then exited forever, leaving only trauma, taking with him any answers.

Not that any answer could ever justify the bloodshed and loss of innocent life seen yesterday.

Again.

Like you, my heart goes out to the students who now join the club of those who have survived a mass shooting.  I physically ache for the parents, friends, relatives of all UCC students – as they desperately attempted to reach their children, spouses, BFFs to verify their safety. And I cannot begin to imagine the anguish of those who heard only an endless ringing and no answer.

What I also feel is anger. Anger that better systems do not exist to protect college campuses, yes, but mostly anger that yet another waste of oxygen has decided to play God and end the lives of so many innocent people.

My message to people like him? If you are hellbent on leaving? Just leave. Find your balls and stick that gun in your own mouth and pull the goddamn trigger and leave the rest of us out of your miserable equation.

We don’t need you.

I don’t care if your childhood was pure shit. I don’t give a rat’s ass if your girlfriend dumped you or if you just lost your job. I don’t care if you have chronic acne and never got laid. I don’t give two shits in a whirlwind that you believe you have been slighted, maligned, misunderstood, or marginalized by someone or something in this life.

We all go through shit. We all get treated in ways we don’t appreciate at some point in our lives. We all experience disappointments, let-downs, slights, heartbreaks, dashed hopes, crushed dreams, bad people, and life’s general ability to make us feel small.

That does not give us the right to strike out and demand some gory retribution.

So whoever you were? I’m glad you’re dead. Call it un-Christian. Call it callous. I don’t care.

I’ll save my prayers for the victims, and especially for all those who now have to learn how to take the next breath in this life, knowing that their child, their spouse, their loved one, their friend, is not taking it with them.

We are a nation that literally has in circulation enough guns for every man, woman, child, and infant in our population.  Let that sink in.  That is over 300,000,000 firearms.  And you cannot tell me that every one of those is owned by someone sane, competent, responsible.  And do not give me the worn out old excuse, "Well, if there had been someone with a gun..."

News for you - UCC allows, with prior permission from the college - concealed carry on its campus.  Roseburg is a small town where the life of the outdoors (hunting, etc) is practiced daily.  Guns are not alien to this town. 

But you could be strapped up like Rambo and not make a tinker's damn worth of difference.  These shooters rely on the element of surprise.  They do not send a calling card indicating when they shall arrive to kill.  And even if you could get to your weapon?  Your own abilities paired with panic and adrenaline mean the outcome could leave more innocent lives taken as you try to "protect" them.  (See recent example out of Texas when a concealed carry enthusiast shot a car jacking victim in the head while trying to "protect" him.  He ran after realizing what a Great White Hunter he actually was not.)

Roseburg is not a huge city, roughly 20,000 people.  Over 3,500 of them attend the community college.  And it is a town like this that will feel this tragedy to the bone.  Small towns may have some drawbacks, but one of them is not a lack of community.  Small towns, for better or worse, have that one down cold.

People know one another.   They have grown up together.  They look out for one another.  Yes, sometimes they are WAY too much in one another's business, but that's part of the tradeoff.

Their community will rally, they will mourn, they will move forward.  What else is there to do? 

I'll tell you.

Look at your child.  Hold the baby you just birthed.  Embrace your spouse.  Call your parents.  Hug your friend.  And then ask yourself if you are willing to sit idly by anymore and allow them to be sacrificed to a mindset that believes "more guns" is any kind of answer.

Because if you think it cannot happen in your town, you are wildly naive.  If you think it won't happen again, you have not been paying attention.

Someone in your town is angry.  In fact, there are hundreds, thousands of these shooters out there.  They inhabit every school, at every grade level.  They are your co-workers, the people choosing apples next to you at the store.  They are there, feeling invisible, marginalized, penalized in life for things over which they feel they have zero control.  Feeling feelings that are too big, overwhelming, desperate. 

And most of all angry. 

Angry at their circumstances.  Angry at the perceived inequities of their life vs the lives they see others living where everything appears Nirvana-ish.  Anger because they have been told to be angry at someone, something, some group.  Directed to blame their life's lot on someone else.  The government, a skin color, women who won't date them, an ideology, a religion.

And that anger sits, ferments, begins to boil, until one day it runs over, cannot be contained, and with the help of 300,000,000 guns - explodes.

Changing yet another town's name to Here.

Again.

I know this because this article has been written by using entire sections of past articles I have written after past mass shootings.  All I have had to do is change the town, adjust the numbers.