Kill Some More Kids ... We Still Have Points to MakeI should have spent less time in church as a kid, looking up at the bleeding wounds of Christ crucified and imagining the awful pain. I might have been a more casual writer or a politician or at least better company. How long did it take after the massacre of the Connecticut innocents before someone planned a campaign based on blood and bits of brain? How long before the NRA wondered how it'd "handle it"? How long before the slogans, before the first not-at-all-weary "expert" volunteered to take his dry, jabbering stance on some television show? How long before the brushfire started on talk radio? How long before the first political cartoon was dumb-assed onto Facebook? There is a way, and I was taught that way as a child, to meditate on Christ's most dripping, awful wound until you feel the pain, then dip below and soar above the pain and see what there is in your own soul. There is a way, and I learned it from suffering old women, to mourn in grace and dignity, to cry in strength, to drop tears like pearls. There is a way, and I learned it in these last weeks, to tread on the body of a dead child like it was an empty paper cup in the street. There is a way to see the frozen, pitiful postures of children in death and count votes. There is a way to make your point with a bit of blood-crusted blond hair, hanging limp from a dead girl's neck.
How long did we stop to mourn these tender dead before we raised the flags of "liberal" or "conservative" and continued the fake-blood WrestleMania of pro-gun versus anti-gun? Are we so rabid to make our "points" that we cannot stop and be sorry? Are we so eager to choke that other side into silence that a child drowning in a throat full of her own blood does not make us stand silent for even a minute? We remember how to argue, but we have forgotten how to grieve. We have forgotten that some things mean more than the everlasting fickleness of the polls, more even than red and blue states, dare we say it out loud. We squeal about killers who "don't value human life," but our own heartless argument in the moments after tragedy show that we value it less because we are not crazy, we're dry-eyed, wondering how to build an argument from a pile of small, dead bodies, each one dear and crushed, opened, blasted into a bloody sack of cancelled future. Was it an automatic weapon? Did the cops SEE a Bushmaster? How much gun legislation did Hitler pass, anyway? Take your answers in a child's kiss grown stiff. Take your arguments, and face them into the feeling you get when a small hand slips its grip on yours. Meditate on the wounds of innocence, and tell me who is winning the argument. We could have cried for just a little longer. To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2013 BY CREATORS.COM 
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