I really must stop going to “holiday” parties. Either man up and call it what it is or I’m not showing up. I mean, I’m pretty sure I’d dress differently if it were a Kwanzaa-centric holiday party. So let’s be clear.
New Year’s Eve parties don’t suffer from lack of nomenclature clarity. Halloween parties either. Why Christmas?
Anyway, I heard a woman at a “holiday” party say that she liked the movie Les Miserables but that it “hits you over the head” with it’s Catholicism. Well, excuse me. I think if any culture in the history of the world could use some hitting over the head, it might just be ours. In fact, I think we all suffer terribly from a lack of being hit over the head.
Another major topic of conversation at the party was gun control in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook elementary school. I suggested to one group I fell in with for a few moments that what we were looking at was a crisis in the family and a refusal to acknowledge the sanctity of life.
Many surprisingly agreed but then said that guns still needed to be taken away. I suggested that this would seem akin to pro-lifers seeking to make scalpels illegal. It really wouldn’t change anything. We either must deal with root causes or we will see more tragedies in the future. The government has deemed drugs illegal but folks still seem to get their hands on them.
In fact, many of the people who seem to think that we can legislate away the possibility of other shooting tragedies are often the same who say that we can’t just make abortion illegal without changing hearts and minds on this issue. Hearts and minds seem to be absent from our current national conversation about Sandy Hook. And it’s our hearts and minds that seem most in need of changing.
Let’s start with hitting people over the head with accurately labeled parties.
