Heather Christena Schmidt

This afternoon I was cleaning up the various clutter that has taken over my house when I got a message from my friend Raynor.

We had just gotten home from our girl’s lunch. We went to Yama Sushi and had udon and yakisoba – my favorites, especially when it is cold. While there the tragedy in Connecticut was on the news, and I explained what happened and how we pray for those innocent children and educators, and for their families. Pookie told me that she hopes Jesus lets those kids play with our dog Watson, who died a few years ago.

So we were cleaning clutter and Raynor sent me a message with a meme attached. He was upset. He actually said he wished he knew who created the meme, because he would go kick the living shit out of the person. If you knew Raynor, you would know that Raynor doesn’t normally talk like that.

As I looked at the meme I was pretty horrified. And here is where I ask: just what is wrong with you people?

Raynor sent me that message on Facebook, and so I then perused through the updates in my newsfeed. Almost everyone had posted about today’s tragedy, although a few were rambling on about guns not killing people, people killing people, and how there is no resolution to the mental health issues this country has been ignoring for decades. Another said that it’s sad, and she’s glad to know that would never happen in her town. I commented on six of those updates, each of them the same: what is wrong with you people?

Earlier this year when the Dark Knight Tragedy in Aurora, CO happened, I felt physically ill when I watched the news and saw an interview with an average movie-goer in Hollywood who said “that’ll never happen to us.” Then and now, I am just dumbstruck by the attitude with which so many people seem to be carrying on their lives.

What is wrong with you people that you cannot see that we have to change everything about our way of thinking, living, and breathing, or this same bullshit is just going to keep happening? What is wrong with you people that it all comes down to your guns and your freedoms and your tax dollars you don’t want to be spent on things you consider “needless”? What is wrong with you people that you cannot see that this culture of “it’s sad but it will never happen to me” is the biggest part of the problem?

I am not advocating for ridding the country of guns. I am not advocating for keeping them either. I am not saying all our tax dollars should go to mental health services. I am really not saying anything political or ideological, I am just saying that we need to wake up. Something is wrong with the entire way we are living our lives as an American people, and to me it seems that as a nation we are stuck in a hazy somnambulism. Everyone is asleep in the cozy comfort they have wrapped themselves in until something like what happened today happens to them.

What is wrong with you people that you can’t see it is wrong to politicize a tragedy? What is wrong with you people that you truly believe your ideological viewpoints are worth preserving more than the lives of innocent children? As I continued to message back and forth with Raynor about that terribly crass, and ultimately pathetic, meme he was so upset over, I kept perusing through my Facebook feed until I reached a point I could not take it anymore. That point was an update where someone posted: “What is wrong with people that they would take the lives of innocent children like that? No one is safe anymore!”

I signed out of my Facebook and thought about what I believe the real issue is. It isn’t that people are sick, people are demented, and that no one is safe because of them. It is that no one is safe anymore, so long as America is asleep. What is wrong with you people that you can’t see the only way to protect the innocent is to to wake up and make a change?