This week I was forced to say goodbye to Dolly Parton, who has been one of the inspirational women in my life. Dolly has simply been there – singing to the world the values she learned in the Great Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee – for as long as I have music memories.

We were both born in 1946, Dolly in January and me in April; we began to be known as the beginners of the cohort called the Baby Boomers who have been rightly saddled with the blame for many of our planet’s woes, trials, and tribulations of epic biblical proportions. Although she grew up “dirt poor,” in her words, she never let challenges or ridicule or insecurities from her background define her. She became an international treasure for her indomitable spirit and determination to bring people along with her.

I have been touched this week by her spirit of perseverance through adversity one more time, and I feel guilty for my relatively good health coupled with my glaring lack of resolve to keep on keeping on this year. Over the years several of her songs have been the cornerstone of many of my personal favorite blogs in this space including one I wrote in December, 2012, about a Hard Candy Christmas following the shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Dolly made me reconsider my retirement this week and, sadly, my consternation over our country’s love affair with guns and violence continues to be a theme that resonates in headlines every day.

****************************

Gosh, the hard candy Christmas has gone viral.   I thought we could keep it local with just a few hits along the holiday trail stories but nope, Newtown, Connecticut changed the name of that tune.   We Americans have a tragedy of unspeakable grief that will quickly reverberate in cyberspace around the world to a populace who will ask themselves, What is wrong with those people in America?

I think it’s a fair question and one that we must ask ourselves.   What is wrong with us?   How do we enable and encourage this rage and senseless violence against our own?   Why do we have a Columbine in our not-too-distant history and how will these same historians record the massacres in Aurora, Colorado, and at Virginia Tech?  What can possibly be written about the Sandy Hook Elementary School horror of losing twelve little girls and eight little boys and six adults who were their educators in a few minutes on a regular Friday morning at their public school.  Much will be written through the coming years, but what we do in response to these shocking events will define our culture and our country.

To the politicians in Washington I say, You need to become statesmen and stateswomen.  You need to set aside your vitriolic verbal attacks on each other.  You are the adults in our family, and we have placed our trust in you by electing you to represent us and when what we see on our Ipads and Iphones and other high-tech gadgets as well as on our regular old television programs is bitterness and bickering and bashing each other verbally, you’re setting a bad example for your children.  You make them believe that rage is not only acceptable but necessary.   Take a deep breath.  Step back for a moment.  Look at yourselves and see what images you project for your people.   Could you please just play nice.

To the parents who have brought children into our world and have great expectations for their futures and who now are bipolar between anger and anguish, I say I’m so sorry.    No one deserves this.   No one is being punished for removing God from Sandy Hook Elementary School.  God isn’t in this equation or else we would have to blame Him for allowing the assailant to have weapons, wouldn’t we?  Not so fast, my friend, or as my daddy and Ann Richards used to say, That old dog won’t hunt.  But what can we do?  Should we as parents insist on police protection for our children in all public schools regardless of age?   Would police protectors be able to thwart the enraged and armed assailants?  These are the questions we ask ourselves.

Which brings me to the central dilemma of the complex  challenge of early identification and intervention for our Angry Ones and that is, of course, beyond Thunder Dome to me.  Our children are now raised in a culture of violence.  They play games with it, they sing songs about it, their heroes are violent athletes, their movie stars make action movies with so much “action” their hearing is impaired when they leave a theater, their country sends soldiers to places they have to learn to pronounce and spell like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria…Viet Nam…Korea..and these soldiers kill other people in the name of peacekeeping. 

  Our children are surrounded by violence.   They may go to sleep with the sound of gunfire in their neighborhood and on their street corners.  They may wake the next morning to find a friend, cousin, uncle, grandmother, father, sister, or brother has died during a battle over what?   Drugs?   Gangs?  Money?   Territory?  Aha.  There we have it.  There is no escaping the violence so why on earth would we be surprised that these children who are accustomed to violence, who have access to weapons, would shoot us when we make them mad or when we are, well, just being ourselves and they don’t like us that way?

This is the season of hope, joy and celebration for some; the Prince of Peace and Santa Claus are the bearers of Good News and Great Gifts for many of us. But it is also a season of sadness for those who have lost family during 2012 and who will be reminded that their holiday season is different this year. The season won’t be the same – ever.  Some people will struggle to find the money to give their children what they want under the tree.   Friction and tension will make family gatherings more problematic than peaceful.  In our sense of hurry and anxiety over putting food on the table we might miss the opportunity to say: I love you today, I love you every day and you will always be special to me.

I remember a hard candy Christmas with the disappointment of not getting what I wanted from Santa Claus but rather getting a sack of penny candy of bright different colors that tasted alternately sweet and sour but couldn’t be chewed at first because it was so hard.  Gradually though, if you waited long enough, you could bite the smaller piece in two and swallow them both.  Success.  Astonishingly delicious.

I expected a hard candy Christmas personally this year for a number of reasons, but I wasn’t prepared for a national one.  Regardless, here it is and my hope is that America will never be the same – ever.  That our national consciousness is raised to include in our vocabulary the words kindness and reconciliation and forgiveness and a genuine passion for a better world.   We’ve waited long enough.  We have tasted both the sweet and the sour and, as Dolly Parton sings through the lyrics of Carol Hall, we won’t let our sorrows bring us down.

I’ll be fine and dandy
Lord, it’s like a hard candy Christmas
I’m barely gettin’ through tomorrow
But still I won’t let
Sorrow bring me way down

**********************

Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library was started in 1995 through her Dollywood Foundation and books numbering in the millions are delivered annually throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and the United Kingdom (Wikipedia). I applied to the program for our younger granddaughter Molly who was three years old at the time and would love to share the covers of the 9 books she’s received thus far. Here’s a sample!

Thank you, Dolly, for the example you set in living a life that was real. Your courage and sacrifices taught us how to be better. I believe in angels – I have believed in you. Rest in peace.