“Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” — Dylan Thomas

Numb. Heartbroken. Speechless. Angry. That is how most of us felt when we heard the shocking and so very “surreal” news about the tragic, senseless deaths of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. How many of us shook our heads in utter disbelief when we heard that 20 innocent children, 6 and 7 years old, lost their precious young lives, along with six adults, some who died trying to save them?

The overwhelming reaction to this evil nightmare is that gun control must be addressed once and for all. How many more lives need to be lost before we realize the havoc guns are wreaking? If the massacre of 20 innocent elementary school children doesn’t finally change the gun laws, stopping the ongoing insanity we have been witnessing far too frequently lately, including the shootings in Colorado, Wisconsin and Oregon, then we will become a society behaving like animals, not civilized people anymore.

When we reach a point where our humanity is in question, and killing becomes a common part of our reality, we run the risk of becoming numb to what is acceptable and normal. Yes, we can identify evil when we see it, such as what happened to those 20 school children, sitting in a classroom learning what each of us were fortunate to learn when we were that young because we weren’t killed by someone possessing evil personified — but evil is something entirely different now, and we must see if for what it has become.

It came to a little town that has never experienced anything remotely sinister before, except for one homicide in the past 10 years. This is a community that functions like we are meant to. It represents everything that is good and pure and healthy, but on that tragic, almost ineffable morning, something happened not only to them, but to all of us. It let us know that normal isn’t normal anymore. This new type of normal is dark, very dark, and we, all of us, must find the light in the darkness again.

Let’s come together and rage against the “dying of the light.” Let’s say “enough” and mean it. Let our voices be heard loudly and not give up shouting “stop” until it does. Let’s not be afraid to look darkness in the face and say, “You must end, or we will die with you.”

When something as heinous happens as what happened to those 20 angels when they were here on Earth, far too brief that they were, we must come together and speak for them as a united voice and say what they would if we could hear their little voices. What do you think they would they tell us? “Hurting one another is bad. Please make it stop?”

Each of us can light a candle and stand up to darkness. Let’s be a community that extends larger than Newtown. We are all connected beyond the boundaries of our cities or towns and can make a difference together. Let’s decide what normal means to us, and if we want it to be what it meant to those beautiful children, before they suffered the consequences of abnormal behavior. Let them be our light in the darkness and help us find our way back to our humanity again through love and peace, not hatred and violence and guns. That is their world now in heaven. Can it be ours here too?