I've been out tonight, and came back, and am reading this thread in a state of shock.
It is too late for me to be posting, I'm tired, but I want to comment on just one thing.
The child in Littleton who was asked, "Do you believe in God?" and replied yes, and was shot....
I think it is over-rational to be making the point that Who knows whether she would have been shot anyway?, and Why is she more important than others?
They are valid points in their way, but they are somehow unconnected to human realities. The child who was shot after being asked that question became real to us, personal, in a way that many of the others didn't have a chance too.
Also, I think we somehow do reserve a special feeling of admiration for a martyr, and of love for a courageous young person. She was a child, and our understanding of what happened, though it may be faulty, is that she was asked a question about whether she believed God existed, to which her deepest conscience required her to reply that Yes, she did, although... she might die for her reply.
It doesn't seem odd to me that the child was especially grieved for. I grieved for her especially; when I heard how she died, I literally burst into tears. My husband had tears in his eyes, too. It was so vivid, and so intimate, and so cruel, and, it seems, so very brave and good and true of her. On the surface of it, it looks as though this child was a martyr.
It didn't make us think she was "bigger and better" than anyone else. But the horrible deaths of all the others also did not diminish hers, in its peculiar species of horror and... this is odd to say... beauty. She died beautiful and brave and whenever I think of her, and her parents, tears come to my eyes again. |
