A few Sundays ago, I was sitting in the breakfast room at a Quality Suites Hotel, peeling a hard-boiled egg. I was in L.A. for my daughter’s softball tournament, and my position as assistant coach had earned me a 6 a.m. wake-up call and a sad looking hotel breakfast. Across the room, a young girl’s smiling face appeared on the TV screen. She looked about 9 or ten, and her straight bangs and dark eyes reminded me of my daughter when she was that age. She even had a dimple on one side of her mouth, just like my Maddie.
The volume was turned down low, so I didn’t know who she was until a caption appeared.
“Christina Taylor Green: Youngest Victim in Arizona Shooting”
The breath left my lungs with a grunt – like someone had punched me in the chest.
There was a time when I wouldn’t have reacted that way. Before I had kids, when I still had that brash sense of immortality that only youth can give, it would have been just another sad story on the morning news. But from the day I first held my newborn daughter in my arms, everything changed. All at once, my illusions of invulnerability were replaced with 7 lbs. 9 oz. of delicate, fragile flesh. I’d put all my eggs in one bassinet, and suddenly the world was a perilous place to live.
In the same way that a mother’s need to nurture comes from deep in her bones, a father’s need to protect is a fierce, instinctive urge. After the baby arrives, we buy alarm systems and put new deadbolts on the doors. We spend countless hours installing gates and latches, padding the corners of coffee tables, and turning our water heaters down.
And just for good measure, we dig up that old baseball bat from the garage and keep it under our bed.
We build an imaginary fortress around our kids and convince ourselves that the hopes and dreams they carry for us are safe and secure. But then a young man in Tucson fires thirty rounds into a crowd, and the fortress walls dissolve before our eyes.
In the days after the shooting, a parade of public figures rushed forward to wash their hands of the whole unpleasant mess. Politicians and activists said their angry rhetoric wasn’t to blame. Gun manufacturers and lobbyists said their guns weren’t to blame. Government officials said their cuts in mental health care weren’t to blame.
The only ones who apologized were the parents of the killer.
“There are no words that can possibly express how we feel,” they wrote, in a note handed to reporters camped outside their home. “We wish that there were, so we could make you feel better. We don’t understand why this happened.”
With all the finger-pointing going on, the one thing we can be sure of is who’s not to blame. That would be Christina Green.
A 9-year-old girl can’t keep hatred and vitriol out of political rhetoric. She can’t keep the mental health system in good repair. She can’t keep extended ammo clips and automatic weapons out of the wrong hands.
She can’t. But we can.
I’m not a political writer, but at some point the political becomes deeply personal. We’ve reached that point when the world we’ve created starts killing our kids. Maybe we need a political party that isn’t about left or right, conservative or progressive. Maybe we need a Parents’ Party. Our platform would only have one plank: “Resolved: That our policies, laws and actions shall benefit our children before they benefit us.”
It’s not such a radical idea. In fact, it’s exactly what parents do already in their own homes. We just need to figure out how to do it as a community, and as a country.
Christina was a dancer, a gymnast, and a swimmer. She volunteered for charity, and she was the only girl on her Little League baseball team. By all accounts, she was bright, articulate, and full of joy – remarkable, yet perfectly ordinary, just like your kids and mine. But by a strange twist of fate, the day of her birth was no more ordinary than the day of her death.
Christina was born on Sept. 11, 2001. Her picture appeared in a book called Faces of Hope – Babies Born on 9/11. Nine years later, that same face flashed across our TV screens, and the hope she carried for us died. It was our job to protect her. We failed.
We always tell our kids to clean up the messes they make. Let’s find a way to clean up our own.
