Of all the horror of the murderous rampage of January 7 in Arizona, the most sickening and heart-wrenching is the murder of a nine year old girl, Christina Taylor Green. It is incomprehensible how her family is dealing with their loss as well as they are. What we have learned from Christina's mother's statement is what a remarkable young girl the world has lost. From being the only girl on her Little League baseball team, The Pirates, to her being elected to her elementary school's student council. Her interest in things political led to her attending with a neighbor the "Congress on Your Corner" event outside a Tucson Safeway on Saturday to meet Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Arizona. “She was a good speaker. I could have easily seen her as a politician,” her dad told the Arizona Star.
Roxanna Green said that her daughter was “very interested in government, she was interested in her community, how she could help her community.”
“They tried to save her but she just couldn’t make it…I saw her right after that. I spent a lot of time with her, and I said goodbye to her.”
Christina was featured in a book called “Faces of Hope: Babies Born on 9/11.” Her parents said that 9/11/2001 being the day of her birth gave Christina an interest in politics. Christina was in fact proud of the fact that she was born on 9/11 and was a patriotic kid, often leaving the house wearing red, white and blue.
'She was a beautiful girl and so intelligent and her light shines on all of us today and forever, and I just have it in my heart that my angel is with my grandmother and my mum in heaven,' said her mother Roxanna Green. 'I'm so proud of her. I'm still proud of her today. I know that she's going to do great things in heaven. She's my angel.'
All of it very hard to grasp and even harder for most of us to make sense of; thankfully it seems that her family through their Catholic faith, at least in some ways have.
Christina can also, I believe, still do great things here on Earth. Her senseless murder must be an event that will empower us all to take any and all steps to seek psychiatric help for any soul we encounter in our live that are sick, troubled and a potential danger to themselves and others.
Unfortunately what we are seeing is political bomb throwing, primarily from the left, accusing talk radio, Sarah Palin's blog, the Tea Party; you name it. Perhaps the sickest of all is a Democrat group calling itself 21st Century Democrats that is using the massacre for political fund raising. Enough already.
The psychotically damaged shooter, Jared Loughner was if anything, a crazed leftist. His favorite books included Mein Kampf and The Communist Manifesto; hardly books on any conservative reading list.
Each of us, as members in this society need to actively seek help for those that we encounter in our personal and professional lives who we believe are in need of psychiatric help. People like Loughner, Mark David Chapman, the Virgina Tech killer, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz and the like don't just happen in a vacuum. There were people in these killers' lives who KNEW that these individuals were potential threats, yet did nothing. E-mails sent by a classmate of Loughner prior to the Tuscon massacre depict Loughner as potentially violent. "Hopefully he will be out of class very soon and not come back with an automatic weapon," the student wrote June 1, 2010, which was the first day of class. Subsequent e-mails raised similar concerns about Loughner. Stopping potential killers before they kill, is about our society's only option.
In addition we need to see increased security for our judges, our politicians like Gabrielle Giffords as well as future ones like Christina Taylor Green.
