Last August we sat, dumbfounded, as Clint Eastwood appeared on stage at the Republican Natural Convention with an empty chair,and proceeded to berate an imaginary President Obama.
And then we started to laugh at Eastwood as the embodiment of old, bitter, get-off-my-lawn, unintentionally funny Republicanism.
Empty chairs have made their way into our national consciousness again.
And it's not even remotely funny.
Consider the chair belonging to Dawn Hochsprung. By all accounts she was an excellent principal at Sandy Hook Elementary. She would get down to the students' level and do activities with them. She was always smiling. She loved her job and she loved her kids and she loved her staff. So much so that she gave her life to try to wrest the the weapons Adam Lanza was carrying from him.
And then there's the chair belonging to Mary Sherlach, a long-time veteran of the school who had worked with the children there as a counselor. She too died in the shooting.
And of course there are others – staff, teachers, parents – who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Someday Sandy Hook School will presumably reopen. There will be a new counselor, a new principal. But no one can fill Dawn Hochsprung's chair. No one can fill Mary Sherlach's chair.
And then there are the children. When the school reopens those chairs will be gone from the classroom, but their classmates' memories of what happened Friday will be frozen in time. Those chairs will forever be empty.
And that's just at school.
There will be empty chairs all over Newtown.
There will be empty chairs at the dinner table.
There will be empty chairs for birthdays and Christmas.
Someday there will be replacements for teachers and staff. But those empty chairs in homes in Connecticut will never be filled.
And the worst part of this senseless tragedy?
It's happened many times before. In Aurora and Columbine and Springfield and Blacksburg and Austin and too many places to list and count. And that's just the shootings in schools and public places. It happens on streets and in homes, in businesses and at random.
And as a nation we seem to just accept this as the price of being Americans.
And if we don't start coming to terms with it, this
is
going
to
happen
again
and
again
and
again
and
again
and
again . . .