A standard grave is about eight feet long, three feet wide and six feet deep. One able bodied man with a shovel can dig one in about three hours, if the ground is soft enough. If the ground is frozen or rocky, or the gravesite near a tree, it can take longer.
For the graves of Nathan Pozner, 6, and his schoolmate Jack Pinto, also 6, the first of the victims of the massacre in Newtown to be laid to rest, it surely took less time than that. Their coffins were much smaller than those of the six adults who died with them will be. The digging should not have taken long at all.
Not long, that is, if the people charged with the thankless task were able to do it without stopping. But I imagine it was something they struggled to do in the time allotted. It's hard to work at a normal pace when you're crying, and it's hard not to cry when you're digging a grave for a murdered 6-year-old, especially when you know there are going to be 19 more just like it, for kids just like them, and even more especially when you know there are six bigger ones to do for the women who died trying to save them.
I'm sure whoever drew the duty found themselves stopping quite a bit.
And then of course there are the final two, of a mother murdered in her bed, shot in the face by a son bent on killing still more and then adding his own name to his list of victims. In that, if in nothing else, Adam Lanza was a complete success.
We may never have an answer for why he did the unthinkable, why someone would choose to slaughter an entire classroom full of little kids with a high power assault rifle, and we surely will never understand it. The only thing we can be sure of is a simple fact: mass shootings have happened in this country with a frightening frequency, they're happening more often than ever before, and we desperately need to make them stop.
Accomplishing that goal isn't going to be easy. There are conflicting rights at issue, and causes we cannot agree on, and whenever that's the case in this country the most extreme, most strident voices also become the loudest and most shrill. It's easy to get distracted from reasonable, common sense solutions when the most unreasonable people, with little sense at all, are driving the debate.
So we as a nation can't let them. We cannot silence them, nor should we want to. But it's time to ignore them and send them back to the fringes of our political spectrum. Let them bray. Let them howl. Let them spew. Let them fight each other while the rest of us stop listening and get to work on trying to prevent an atrocity like this from ever happening again. Let's block them out and give them their own cold, dark silent day. It's a far better fate, after all, than lowering another tiny casket into a cold, dark silent grave.
