For anyone who loves kids, yesterday’s horror in Connecticut was even more painful than the recent shootings in Colorado and Arizona.  When I first read about it, I didn’t want to believe it and hoped that (the) initial reports (I read) were wrong.  I became almost numb when I learned that they were not.

At times like these, words often fail us.  We struggle to express the sadness we feel as we struggle to understand how man could do this to his fellows, particularly those so young, children who have just begun to taste life.  And we feel anger, anger that this has happened, anger that someone could do this — and we want to direct our anger at some target so we can better make sense of the horror.

So must our ancestors have reacted throughout human history to the perennial problem of man’s inhumanity to man.  Each of us finds difference ways to grapple with something we cannot understand.  And perhaps that is why the image of hell (in its various manifestations) has long resonated with people from a great variety of backgrounds, honoring and worshipping a great variety of deities.

“Gehenna, a synonym for Hell,” John Podhoretz wrote yesterday in Commentary

. . . was revived today in Newton, Connecticut, where as many as 20 children at last report were slaughtered in an elementary school this morning.

We learn in the book of Kings that in the seventh century BCE, the prophet Jeremiah demanded that King Josiah destroy the idolator’s temple in Gehenna to prevent more sacrifices to Moloch. We can presume from the newsworthiness of this act that child sacrifice was once a relatively common practice in the ancient Middle East, as we know it to have been in other pagan cultures.

. . . .

The idea that civilization is dedicated to the protection and preservation the weak and the innocent, and not about fulfilling evil impulses to defile and destroy innocence, is the root and core of the West. One cannot conceive of anything more monstrous than a person or persons who could look small children in the eye and systematically shoot them dead. Which is why this crime, among the worst crimes in American history, is not just an assault on the children, or their families, or the town of Newtown—though it is all those things. (more…)

Perhaps by writing this, I will make it a bit easier to blog, but I don’t know.

When I used to run road races, particularly my favorite distance, the half-marathon, I would have this wonderful feeling of accomplishment and this oddly pleasant sensation of soreness in my legs for a day or two after the race.  And as I enjoyed those sensations, I also found it much more challenging to run.  I sometimes delighted in that irony that for a few days after running my best, I was not able to run well at all.

And so it seems, after two weeks focusing on the second chapter of my epic, I have been finding it challenging to write.  Much as I love The Hobbit–and as long as I had thought about adapting it for the screen, I did not find the words flowed as smoothly as I would have liked as I wrote my post yesterday on how I would have written the screenplay.

There remain issues to blog about — and a good number I’d like to address — and will try to do so this afternoon (Pacific Time), but right now feel like today is the day to gather my notes, setting myself up to write the third chapter, entirely different from the third chapter in the outline of the epic’s first section only last week.

It seems that now is the time to jot down notes rather than to craft a coherent narrative, but we bloggers recognize that pressing issues sometimes arise when our writing energy is sapped. Like the days after a great run, the few days after a good run of writing seem to be days when we have depleted the energy to engage in the activity which we once performed to the best of our ability.

Unfortunately, due to all my writing this past week (not to mention holiday shopping obligations), I was unable to read the submissions in the Watcher of Weasels’ weekly selection (nor vote in the competition), but here are the winners:

Council Submissions

• The Noisy Room – When You Have Nothing To Lose, Do The Right Thing
• The Political Commentator – Which of these keeps you up at night?
• The Independent Sentinel – U.S. Marine Jon Hammar Has Been Left Behind in a Mexican Prison
• Joshuapundit-Hanukkah..The Festival Of Lights And Freedom
• The Mellow Jihadi – What I Learned Training at a New Navy Base
• GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD – Benign Neglect.
• Simply Jews – Palestine’s strangely stubborn state of mind?
• VA Right! - Boehner and Cantor’s ‘War on Conservatives’ Causes Exodus of Conservatives from the GOP
• The Razor – Young Men and the Women of Generation Cupcake
• The Colossus of Rhodey – Today in ‘Imagine if this was George W. Bush’
• The Glittering Eye -Cognitive Dissonance
• Bookworm Room – Sheldon Adelson: Put aside social conservativism to reclaim America
• Gay Patriot – Those who supported Obama’s election the most suffer the most from his policies
• The Right Planet – Union Mayhem: Cross-Dressers & Sucker Punches
• Rhymes With Right – SCOTUS To Rule On Gay Marriage (more…)