“Here come those tears again, Just when I was getting over you, Just when I was going to make it through, Another night without missing you, Thinking I might just be strong enough after all,
When I hear your footsteps echoing in the hall…”—Jackson Browne, “Here Come Those Tears Again.”
There is an elephant in the room.
We’d rather not think about it, but it’s hard to ignore.
The elephant came like a thief in the night, on the airwaves, broadcast on radios, TVs and in newspapers.
It came when tragedy struck—again—in Aurora, Colo. on Friday, July 20, when a mass shooting occurred—again.
This time it was during a midnight screening of the film “The Dark Knight Rises” at a Century movie theater in that midwestern town.
A gunman, dressed in protective gear and clothing, set off tear gas grenades and shot into the audience with multiple firearms, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others. The sole suspect is 24-year-old James Eagan Holmes, who was arrested outside the cinema, minutes later.
Once again, we are a nation horrified at an act of violence that just doesn’t seem to make any sense. From these news reports we now have plenty of visions of the evil carnage to haunt our thoughts and dreams for some days ahead. We see photos displayed of someone’s darling little blond-haired girl with a sweet smile who was among the dead and we wonder about the pain now visited on her family and if it will ever fade.
We hear stories of young military men who never fired a shot in anger and how they covered their dates with their own bodies, sacrificing their lives to an enemy we can not seem to define.
There sits the elephant in the hearts and minds of we the people of the Sun Region.
He glares and demands not to be denied. He is a memory that haunts us we’d rather forget. He reminds us of what happened here in Seal Beach on Oct. 12 of last year.
On that day, in this sleepy seaside town called “Mayberry by the Sea,” well, you probably already know, but for the record: Eight people were killed and one critically injured in a horrendous shooting at the Salon Meritage.
The suspect wore body armor as he allegedly burst into the business, angry with his ex-wife, intent on taking no prisoners.
The location was in what the folks refer to as “Old Town,” just beyond Seal Beach’s Main Street. It’s a place where children—still—skip along the sidewalk, strangers exchange hellos, and people generally feel safer than most places on the planet. Suddenly, this normally salubrious city was thrown into the national spotlight as its murder rate skyrocketed to an increase of 800 percent.
Now, a similar event has occurred, bringing back the confused thoughts about our own tragedy and trying, each of us by our own design, to make sense of it all.
Most of us probably just want to know how we could prevent such a thing from ever happening again.
Some say we need more gun control. Some say we need less. Some say we need more religion and others say why bother. Some will light candles and try to illuminate the darkness of the night. Others will wait until the wind no longer blows; yet somehow, we are all in this together.
For me, the best I can think of is to remember to call the people I love and remind myself that all we really have is time and each other.
Dennis Kaiser is the editor of the Sun Newspaper.
