We need to save our babies.

“Evil visited this community today,” said Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy with sorrow, reflecting on the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut yesterday morning. The gunman, Adam Lanza, killed his mother at their home, then opened fire inside the school. He massacred 26 people, including 20 children. We need to save our babies.

The story is heartbreaking. It is the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre that left 33 people dead. It reminds us of the tragic Columbine massacre in 1999. What are we to make of such reckless hate? How are we to respond as a nation, as a people? Are we going to stay asleep and do nothing? We need to save our babies.

Learning that so much of the motivation behind such horrific crimes is bound up with anonymity, loneliness and mental illness is a wake up call that something is wrong. Columbine was an anomaly, but now we have a pattern. Something is wrong when a society’s moral and communal structures can produce so many “casualties” from its overlooked, its forgotten, its citizenry. That something is wrong, we can all see; what to do about it is a much more difficult question. And something is definitely wrong with our gun laws. We need to save our babies.

We are mourning. We are horrified. Brokenhearted and reeling, we must wonder what to make of it all. Though we don’t have all the answers, and though there is still so much hurt and so many unanswered questions, let us fight to make our neighborhoods and families safer, better, more loving places. May we love our neighbors.

We need to reach out to the anonymous, the overlooked, the forgotten. We need to care for our children. What if it is not enough  to only cry out for change, for reform, for action? What if the solution to the problem starts on our own street? With our own communities? With the mentally ill or the hurting in our own cities? What if we really can be the change?

We need to show our babies that we love them no matter what color they are. And perhaps when we heal our country, we will think twice about creating wars all over the world, where so many beautiful babies are killed or maimed.

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Ed: Sara Crolick

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 Sherri Rosen is now living in Harlem, New York. She has had her own publicity business for 12 years giving a powerful voice to people who are doing good things in the world. She writes her own blog at Sherri Rosen.