The shock settles into our private thoughts looking for a place that will explain the wanton destruction of so many lives, most especially of the youngest innocents who could not have understood the savagery which faced them, and each one of us wonders, “why?” We sense a particular empathy for Connecticut parents who will never again know another day quite like those they had known prior to the morning of December 14, 2012.
We feel a profound sadness and quietly, privately, shed a tear for the harm which has befallen our neighborhood. Most of us have compassion for the extreme pain imposed on a fellow community. Most of us that is, but not all.
A few seem to have recognized an opportunity for self-promotion amidst the grieving, the commotion and sense of loss. As I read posts like this regarding ABC News editorial producer Nadine Shubailat, and like this one concerning Katie Couric, I am reminded of an interview I watched in the mid ‘80s conducted by Diane Sawyer. Sawyer interviewed a couple, in their home, some time after their daughter had been severely abused and killed and her body mutilated. I shall never forget the revulsion I sensed at Sawyer’s insane question delivered with a furrowed brow feigning a pained look, “How does it feel?” I could never view her, or her ilk in the same light again. In fact, I find it impossible to listen to anything such talentless, mindless drones have to disseminate.
These same parasites have today invaded Sandy Hook Elementary School and its environs, extracting comments from shocked and grieving children, as well as from their parents. Ms. Shubailat boasts that, “she books interview subjects for Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, Barbara Walters, Robin Roberts, Jake Tapper, Bob Woodruff and other ABC journalists,” which suggests the invasion and the attacks will continue.
We may not all know their pain, but we can sense and feel sorrow which all of these families in Connecticut are living through. Personally, I do not wish to have a microphone shoved in their faces on my behalf. Leave them alone. When those who represent law enforcement have updates, they will provide them, and from those professionals we will hope to find answers.
Until then, leave these children and their families in peace to grieve privately, and to gradually regain some footing in lives which will never be the same, in a community which will also never be the same.
A constituent of the vast baby boomer generation with a career which has been fortunate to know the ponderous corporate worlds, as well as the intimately pressurized, and invigorating entrepreneurial domains of high tech and venture capital, I have harvested my share of mistakes meandering through corridors of enterprise from Silicon Valley, to London and endless, colourful, sometimes praetorian points in between. The voyage has provided an abundance of fodder for a pen yielding to an inquisitive keyboard, a foraging mind, and a passionate spirit.
Whether political or business or social or economic or personal, is it not all political? It is a privilege to write, and an even greater privilege to be read by anyone, and sometimes with the wind at my back the writing may occasionally be legible. I do not write to invite scorn, nor to invite respect, but if I get really lucky the writing can stimulate thinking. I also write for the very selfish purpose of animating my own processes, and engaging the best of what life offers. Above all, whether biting fire or swatting shadows, I am grateful to be gifted the freedom to write and publish whatever flows down to the keyboard. To all those who enabled this freedom, and to all those standing guard to preserve it, I am indebted.