Another mass shooting - this one at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., taking 26 lives, including 20 children - has anguished Americans. In a sign of the times, such a horrific event is becoming more commonplace across our fruited plain.
The reasons are numerous. They total more than 55 million.
In 1973, when the Supreme Court legalized abortion on demand, we cheapened all human life - without exception - and that 55 million and counting is the fatality list among the aborted, the most innocent among us.
If six million is a holocaust, tell me - what does 55 million make?
We are dealing with more than 55 million victims, but where are they? On this, the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade that conferred abortion as legal in the United States, most of its victims have been either incinerated or carted away to the local landfill. They are voiceless and unseen - the true silent majority. They don't interrupt and make things uncomfortable; most of all, they don't inconvenience us.
Localities like Newtown, Columbine and Virginia Tech are a conduit to the abortion movement's chickens that have come home to roost. The abortion business is thriving from coast to coast. No need to worry about jobs being lost overseas.
For nearly four decades, two generations of Americans have grown up with and recognize abortion as another burlesque form of birth control. This isn't some byzantine assumption; the harrowing statistics lay credence to such a grim and growing reality. For a healthy dose of perspective, the website is simple enough: numberofabortions.com.
Violence begets only more of the same. In what passes for contemporary culture, we not only glorify violence and the murder of the unborn, we've turned it into a billion-dollar industry the world over.
Today's contemporary credo is human life isn't sacred, let alone something to be valued. So why anyone is shocked when one immerses themselves in the cult of violence on a mass scale is beyond simple reasoning. Coming to terms with this as a nation must be foremost.
Tragically, it isn't even a blip on the radar.
What is not only ironic, but conspicuous, is how the nation's looming economic woes juxtapose with our deteriorating cultural mores.
Many retired Americans, in particular the grandparents, are at a loss as to how anesthetized many of our young people are toward such heinous acts of mayhem. It's not just what they watch in the theater or on broadcast TV. It's the hours anchored to the couch playing computerized video games where the objective is to hunt down and kill en masse without pain or consequence. Then when another deranged gunman emerges and thinks nothing of firing on unarmed, innocent people, we stand up as if on cue to pronounce our disgust and outrage.
Much of our country, especially its leaders, remains in a corrupted and seemingly disabled case of denial. Sitting in the Oval Office is a man, who while in the Illinois state legislature, voted against saving babies that survive abortion and who also infamously claimed such things are "above his pay grade." But his pay grade had no problem including massive federal funding of abortion through Obamacare. Even more menacing is Obama using executive privilege in order to circumvent the more democratic legislative process.
By no means does it end there, as Obama, while on the campaign trail, addressed euthanasia when he deadpanned, "Maybe you're better off not having surgery, but taking painkillers" to an elderly person. We have slithered down the slippery slope completely ignoring the dignity of life in any form by establishing what society comprises as the so-called quality of life for others. If such a quality doesn't pass our conventional muster, then they are fit to die. We have reached such contempt for life that it is seemingly compromised on all levels.
What Obama and his legion of liberal followers fail to comprehend is that there will be no tranquility, no true peace while respect for all life continues to be denied. True peacemakers, whom Jesus Christ described in the Beatitudes as "sons of God," are those who defend human life from beginning until its natural end.
It took nearly seven decades for the United States to emancipate slavery. This year marks the fourth decade trying to emancipate the least among us - the unborn. This Friday in Washington, D.C., a record crowd is expected to participate in the annual March for Life where they will crusade for those who can't. Many from the local area will join the bus brigade a few hundred thousand strong for something much greater than themselves.
Hope is alive in Washington, D.C., and it doesn't reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. or with any other entrenched politico, but with those intrepid marchers whose continued efforts will one day regale Roe v. Wade to its proper place in the ash heap of history.
(Greg Maresca, a freelance columnist, composes "Talking Points" for each Sunday edition.)
