"A Penny for the Old Guy"

You can smell the natural gas pumped into your house because of New London, Texas.

I've mentioned this in passing before.    Sometime in the late '60's I spent a day in New London, and found it a town still haunted by the specter of the gas explosion that took out the school that cold early morning in March.  As the website at my link indicates, it is remembered there to this day, 80 years later.

Now imagine how long the people of Sutherland Springs will remember November 5, 2017.  "Remember, remember, the 5th of November."  But they won't be burning bonfires, wearing masks, or asking for a penny for the Old Guy.  The world will move on, and forget; Sutherland Springs won't.

New London faded into history but left a legacy of safety, a warning to the rest of us, a way of preventing that calamity from happening again (it still does, from time to time, but not because no one can possibly now what is building up in the basement).  We don't need to remember New London; we live now because of it's lesson.  That, in itself, is a lesson:  we can't prevent every explosion from natural gas buildup, but we have prevented so many it is a rare event.  We can't prevent every murderous act, but that doesn't mean, like the FBI agent told Sutherland Springs per NPR this morning, that we have to start thinking about how much danger we are in when we gather together to watch a movie or to worship or just to be together.  If that's what we have to do, then government has failed us, and we can no longer enjoy life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness.

And this is in the name of freedom, of the "right" to "keep and bear arms"?  Why does that right trump our ability to gather together, to worship, to pray, to be entertained?  Is the lesson we are going to take from Sutherland Springs the lesson that there's nothing we can do but be afraid (because even the "good guy with a gun" didn't prevent 50 people from being shot or killed)?

That's not the lesson we took from New London.  It doesn't have to be the lesson this time.