The so-called "festive" season was marred this year by the killing of 20 children and two adults at the Sandy Hook School in Connecticut. However, the massacre and its aftermath took more away from our basic humanity than it did unite us in it or highlight it.

As the pundits claimed, the world watched in horror as little bodies were mourned on street corners, in livingrooms, and at front doors where relatives of the victims were willing to talk to the cameras and diplay their grief globally. Poignantly, the next day and the next, an unarmed soldier stood guard by the flag outside an elementary school in California after promising the children they would be safe. All moving stuff - heart-breaking and heart-rendering at the same time. Hard enough to take without major news stations spending a full week stirring the story, pulling heart-strings and making reference to the accessibility of handguns in America.

While no one who has either had or had and lost a child would come down hard on any of the parents,  the news media deserves more than a slap on the wrist, not for covering every (important and unimportant angle of the "story"), but for missing an opportunity to merely state some facts or to make tidy, non-ideological reference to the hundreds of thousands of children who are killed, murdered everyday across the globe. The day before the Sandy Hook shootings, 187 children were killed in Syria by government forces. Approximately 50 were killed in an American drone attack in Pakistan the week before. Starved by government miltia, over 100 children were killed just this past week lining up for bread smuggled into a major city by three anti-government individuals and parents. And the list goes on in Gana, Somalia, even, still, and again, amid unrest, in Egypt. Life and the events at Sandy Hook School, at Aurora, at Virginia Tech, and so on behoove us to think and feel beyond our own children. Or, to put it more honestly, beyond our own race, customs, ethnicity and quotidien wars. We still, evidentally, value white children over black or beige children, children killed in our neighborhoods over those killed but not noticed or reported on from lesser, different locations, that we ourselves wouldn't venture into with ease.

The old debate has stirred a bit.  A savvy, dry-eyed, yet apparently teary president has announced he will (yet again) look into the issue of gun control. How about we all re-think the value of all human life and the fact that it ithe killng spaces are over-flowing everyday with youth destroyed by our blind obedience to  historic patterns of madness.