I wanted to write about metal today, as always, but I failed. My mind was still trying to wrap itself around something else, namely, 20 innocent children and six innocent adults gunned down at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, USA, on December 15, 2012.

I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough that I feel pretty hardened against the horrors of the world. Tragedies, big and small, are part of daily life. The world is more interconnected than ever before, and we can read about and watch bloodbaths like this one every day if we want to — because somewhere in the world, each day brings a fresh horror of some kind.

There’s only so much individual human tolerance for bad news. If you don’t armor yourself to some degree against the pain of other people, it’s damned hard to put one foot in front of another and keep going.

But the death of children . . . the unnecessary, unpredictable death of 20 children . . . is especially hard to take.  You have to have really thick armor to deflect something like this.

I know that, somewhere, children die in droves every day, usually in places where disease or starvation or grotesque neglect claim them. But like all horrors, the closer to home they are, the more you feel them. It’s just easier to imagine that they could happen to you, or your children, or your friends, or their children. Evolution is probably to blame for both our increased sensitivity to tragedies that we can more easily imagine as happening to ourselves or those we love, and our comparative indifference to more remote instances of catastrophic loss. Continue reading »