Newtown

I don’t have much to add about the Newtown shootings other than this:

If you don’t live in New Orleans, you’ve forgotten about Katrina. Maybe you were outraged for a while. Maybe you blamed Bush and considered Ray Nagin a hero for a month or two. Now? Your outrage has dulled.

If you don’t live in Joplin, you’ve forgotten about the tornado and the 189 people it killed—if you’d ever even known about it in the first place.

If you don’t live in New York or New Jersey, you’ve already forgotten about Sandy, because the media’s past telling you how hard it is to find bleach in the Rockaways. That shit doesn’t matter.

And if you don’t live in New York or you don’t have a direct connection to the military, your 9/11 outrage has, in all probability, been replaced by something else entirely. It’s just something that happened to somebody else, just like everything else in the world. It’s as far away as Rwanda.

That’s why nothing will change now. We’ll lose our momentum, the media will move on, and we won’t hear a blessed thing about it until the next lunatic opens fire.

I want to be wrong. If shooting 20 children—along with six adults we shouldn’t ever forget—doesn’t change everything, we’re finished as a society.

I’m not criticizing. I’m no different.