The Ironies are
Killing Us
by Thomas B.
Woodward
There are times when the ironies of
life get to be too much. One in particular had to do with the Sandy Hook
massacre of those little children. It shook me to the core. Others have
followed, but I will stick with Sandy Hook.
Besides the terrible carnage in it
all, there was this newspaper headline: "NFL Honors Victims of Sandy Hook
School Shootings." Now there, I thought, is something close to the
ultimate irony: fans and players of a sport centered on violent confrontations
of every minute of every game are somehow honoring not the perpetrator, but the
victims of violence. That few would find such an irony startling is probably a
good measure of how deadened we have become to the symbolism and reality of so
much of our life.
The more I thought about that
headline, the more upset I became. The National Football League thought it was
honoring the victims of Sandy Hook shootings by doing what, in good part, led
to the shootings in the first place! Keeping silent. "My God," I
thought, "a secondary and even worse irony." The symbolism and the
reality of those moments of silence in the sport's pregame ceremonies surely
should have pushed at least one commentator into paroxysms of disgust.
"Dream on," I thought. This holy moment of silence, ironically,
speaks not for the victims, but for those who have been observing decades of
silence in the face of innocent suffering. How civil we are. We will honor the
fallen by keeping our mouths shut.
So what was the story I wanted to
read? I would keep the headline, but the
story would have a different direction. It would read something like
Yesterday the National Football League
set aside a period of time before each of its Sunday games to honor the victims
of the Sandy Hook shootings with five minutes of outrage. Following the lead of
the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, each stadium crowd was led in five minutes of
chanting "No More. No More, It's Enough! No More Guns!" by officially
clad cheerleaders of the competing teams, each flanked by their own children or
nieces and nephews. The response seemed to vary from stadium to stadium, with
voices barely heard in some locations while the chanting was deafening in
others, often lasting fifteen minutes or more after the cheerleaders had
retired to the sidelines.
I wonder if anyone inside or outside
our churches, synagogues, or mosques expects anything but the ironies, with the
silence and relief that community acquiescence brings. It frightens me that
there is no institution we can count on for focused and continuing outrage. In
that fear my mind went back to the words of the athiest, Albert Camus, as he
spoke to a group of Dominican monks about what the world expects of Christians:
What the world expects of Christians is
that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their
condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could
rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from
abstraction and confront the blood-stained face
history has taken on today.[1]
Silence,
yes, if it is to recall the holiness of innocent life. Silence, yes, if that
remembered holiness leads us unequivocally to safeguard that holiness against
the worship of anything that might threaten or snuff it out, even guns. However,
if that silence dies outs in the stadium, let those Dallas Cheerleaders and
their sisters take over, thrusting their pompoms into the sky, demanding,
"Enough. Enough!" as they stand with all those who fear for our
children and who refuse to accept legislative loopholes and clever judicial
distortions of the Second Amendment. Ironies and oxymorons are clever and
original intent justices may be even more clever, but they won't be able to
stand up to a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader with a child on each arm.
