To Be Thankful Again

Its eight days until Christmas and this year we have a lot to look back on and a lot to be thankful for. This year we faced a lot of hardships, not only as a country but as a species. We face the 2012 election with high hopes and expectations and thankfully our man came out the winner. We faced the Benghazi issue and tried to remember all those who died during the war. We even face the threat of extinction in the next few days, as many people believe that the world will end on the twenty first of December (BTW: all of those who made a bet with me that the world would end owe me fifty dollars. That may not b the amount we agreed on, but it’s the amount I will come searching for).

We even saw great triumphs as we saw a man sky dive from the edge of space, the first photos of DNA were taken, water was found on Mars, and many others.  

But we saw some great losses as well this year, and the shooting that occurred in Connecticut last Friday was the most tragic. Twenty school children ages six to seven and six other adults were slain by Adam Lanza, a 20 year old troubled young man who many people claim was highly intelligent.

This tragic event all happened just days before Christmas and everyone in America is heart broken. We think about how these people won’t be able to spend the holidays with their children and how this will affect them in the long term. There will not be a Christmas for the families of twenty children and six adults in Newtown Connecticut. There may never be another Christmas again for some of those families now, and yet we get to go on celebrating, yet being mindful and thankful for what we have.

What’s a real shame is that according to reports this Adam Lanza kid was actually pretty intelligent; however there were also many reports that he was pretty weird and prone to outbursts. He attended college at the age of sixteen at Western Connecticut State University where he got a 3.26 GPA. Many described him as introverted and weird but overall a nice kid. I guess it’s true what they say; it’s always the quiet ones you have to watch out for.

So how does this happen? What happens to a kid like this to make him steal his mother’s firearms and murder her then force his way into an elementary school to kill more innocent children before taking his own life? What was going through the mind of Adam Lanza days or even months before he committed this horrible act? Did he plan this, and if he did then why? What connection did he have to that school other than the fact that he attended that school? Was he out for revenge of some kind? Did he feel like he was slighted as a child when he attended? Such a brash series of choices he made…did he know he would end up offing himself in the end? Was he trying to copycat some other school shooting event?

This kind of thinking will drive you crazy. I honestly don’t want to care about why he did it because in the end the act was still committed and lives were not only lost but destroyed.

So this Christmas, while you sit warm in your house with your family, just remember those who we lost and the Christmases that will not be for some people this year. This affects our children too, so hug’em if ya got’em.

(How will you be celebrating Christmas this year after the terrible events that occurred in Connecticut this year? Post your thoughts below.)

SOURCES:

YAHOO! NEWS ARTICLE