The Demolition of Sandy Hook

Jan 5 2018

The demolition of Sandy Hook

included kindergarten chairs

and cute little desks,

blackboards, still covered in chalk.

Terrazzo floors

unlocked doors

shards of shattered glass.

The entire place

levelled, bulldozed, razed;

then its flag folded

its pole dismantled

its rubble carted away.

The elementary school

where 20 small children were shot

point-blank,

sacrificed

on the alter of guns

in a country that kills too much

and doesn't spare its young.

And now, many years later

while the shooter is dead

and the children are mourned

and the families crushed,

the guns persist

the laws still stand.

But the building was deemed unbearable,

too painful

to even look at.

An act of forgetting

that reminds me of the dull grey men

saluting from the Kremlin's steps,

air-brushed out

by the new regime.

Reminds me of the elementary texts

that sanitize the sins of the past

excuse our moral blind-spots;

simplifying history,

omitting the unthinkable.

Another decade of carnage,

and all the names

will have coalesced

into hazy numb acceptance.

Another decade

of daily death

and words like Newtown, Sandy Hook

SIG Saur, Bushmaster, Glock

will have all lost their meaning;

the subject changed

the shooter expunged

the school utterly gone.

The bodies buried.

The small headstones

atop their graves.

I don't write political poetry. (By “political”, I mean public policy and advocacy, not partisan politics – which not even the most ideological would submit to poetry!) But sometimes, I think emotion is all we're left with: that on some issues, we are way past the cool detachment of analysis, the carefully considered exercise of balanced fair objective thought; that on some issues, we're in a place where all that argument and essay and debate have to offer has been exhausted.

There was a piece in this month's National Geographic (Jan 2018) called The Science of Good and Evil (by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee), and it opened with a picture of Sandy Hook Elementary. I was impressed by its attractive curved facade of wood and river-stone. I was surprised when the caption informed me that this was all new: that the original had been torn down, as if even the sight of the building where the massacre took place was too much to bear. Down to the flagpole, the caption was careful to say. So, was this an act of reverence and honouring? ...or was it an act of intentional forgetting, where history is sanitized and bad memories expunged? How ironic: the school was demolished, but the gun laws were never changed.

(I very intentionally left out the name of the shooter. He (yes, as usual, a “he”) deserves to be forgotten. We should never risk allowing the notoriety and perverse celebrity of mass killers to become an inducement to other alienated and deluded misfits.)

(The litany of guns is taken from an actually account of his arsenal (as a cursory review on Google has it).)

(There were also 6 adults gunned down. I'm sorry if the poem diminishes this loss, but my intention was to emphasize the killing of the children: if such a depraved act was not sufficient to push legislators into reforming gun laws, then nothing will.)