Newtown - my two cents worth

Hi everyone,

I'm drafting this post at my office.  It's 8:30pm on Saturday evening, and I came in just to do some tedious jobs that wouldn't actually need my brain to focus.  I've been reading, responding to, printing and archiving two week's worth of emails.  I receive about 40 emails a day, so you can imagine that this took a while.  But, if I'd let it go another week, it would have been significantly worse.  I've really come to value archiving my emails: I can actually FIND information when I need it.   Otherwise, I've kept it a restful Saturday: I did laundry this morning and sussed out possible Christmas presents for people in the CBD, got a haircut and then came here.

I wanted to say something about the shootings in Connecticut.  I don't usually much discuss current events in these pages: there's enough people spilling ink on things like the Presidential election, for example, without needing me to add my valueless two cents.  This massacre, though, begs a response.
We all know what the news of the next few days will mean: coverage of the victims that will range from the sentimental to the ghoulish.  Patronising editorials in the British and Australian press about "the American love affair with gun".  Probably a political shitfight over an assault weapons ban or something of the like.  And both pro- and anti-gun advocates trotting out the same hackneyed, shop-soiled, well worn arguments we've heard a million times before.

This usually feels unseemly to me; this time, however, it feels like it will actually be nauseating.  Maybe it's because I've been thinking a lot about different types of knowledge and how we can think about things, but I feel (and I say "feel" rather than "think" intentionally) that taking those poor, dead children and teachers and making them the subjects of the narrative of a news story, or the basis for a government policy or lack thereof, or the starting point for some psychoanalysis of the American character, is to misuse them.  Maybe the only response, the only decent response, is an aching, silent grief, a wish to take onto oneself the hurt of their parents and brothers and sisters, and an attempt - silently and within one's own heart - to take to oneself and hold without intellectualising a pain too big for words.