Outrage: Newton Hero Getting Harassed, But Grace and Kindness Emerge, Too.

Some bad outsiders are invading the grace and strength of Newtown, Connecticut a month after a gunman killed 27 people there, including 20 sweet first graders. 

The outrageously bad here is  made worse because it's happening to a very good man. 

Newtown, Ct. hero Gene Rosen

In the news reports right after the Newtown shooting, you might have seen a kindly man named Gene Rosen in interviews. He lives very near the school. Six kids and a bus driver fled the shooting and wound up on his lawn. Rosen hustled the kids inside his house, and kept them safe, comforted them, gave them juice and toys and called their parents so they could come get them.  

The interviews showed him to be a generous, good man, the kind of guy that any community would be proud to have in their town.

So what does Rosen get for his grace and warmth? Lots of harassment from conspiracy theorists, according to Salon.  

These conspiracy theorists insist the Newtown massacre was a hoax, a way to take away our guns, establish a dictatorship or something. Who knows? 

From  the Salon article:

“I don’t know what to do,” sighed Gene Rosen. “I’m getting hang-up calls, I’m getting some calls, I’m getting emails with, not direct threats, but accusations that I’m lying, that I’m a crisis actor, ‘how much am I being paid?’” Someone posted a photo of his house online. There have been phony Google+ and YouTube accounts created in his name, messages on white supremacist message boards ridiculing the “emotional Jewish guy,” and dozens of blog posts and videos “exposing” him as a fraud. 

Salon writer Alex Seitz-Wald went on to quote Rosen:

"Here’s my fear: If I start talking like this, will one of these truthers read this and will it embolden them? Will they say, screw that guy, how dare he impugn our credibility or question our intellect, I’m going to go one step farther? Am I being stupid?” he asked.

After thinking about it, Rosen decided that he had to speak out: “I talk to you about this because I feel that there has to be some moral push-back on this.” Rosen said he’s a staunch believer in free speech, and realizes there is little legal recourse possible unless he gets direct threats, so he had a different idea.

“There must be some way to morally shame these people, because there were 20 dead children lying an eighth of a mile from my window all night long,” he said, choking back tears. “And I sat there with my wife, because they couldn’t take the bodies out that night so the medical examiner could come. And I thought of an expression, that this ‘adds insult to injury,’ but that’s a stupid expression, because this is not an injury, this is an abomination.”

Rosen has the right idea, but good luck shaming the conspiracy theorists harassing him. Many of them have no shame.

On the bright side, Rosen said he's also gotten a large number of messages and emails praising him for his actions. I don't know his email address, but if he were to read this, I totally agree with those positive messages.

Hang in there Mr. Rosen!

Now on to some undeniably heartwarming news our of Newtown:

In an incredibly nice gesture, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz, known more widely as members of the Talking Heads and the Tom Tom Club, invited a group of child singers from Newtown, Conn. to their home studio to record a version of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."

Proceeds from the recording, which went on sale Tuesday, will go to the Newtown Youth Academy and United Way of Western Connecticut, which are helping Newtown recover from that tragic December massacre. 

The singers also got help from Sabrina Post, a Newtown-based vocal coach and Tim Hayes of the famed New York nighclub CBGB.

The video of the group recording the song, below, really tugs at your heart. Bring the tissue. 

On Cue, Here Come the Sandy Hook Massacre Scam Artists

All of us want to show our support for the people of Newtown, Connecticut, who lost so much and are suffering so terribly in the wake of Friday's Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

Well, most of us anyway. You might have noticed on Facebook and Twitter and other social media invites to "like" or otherwise acknowledge or donate money to memorial pages and memes for the shooting victims.

It's easy and natural to respond to the invites. We want to do something to help. But according to Consumerist.com, most of those invites are scams.

The ones that ask for money are often run by people who will just pocket the money.

The memorial sites that just want you to "like" or support turn out to be dangerous, too. They seem safe. A friend you know on Facebook has liked the page, and invites you to like it, too. Since your friend is trustworthy, you like the page, too, to show support for both your friend and the Newtown victims.

What you and your friend don't know is this process means the memorial pages and memes get a lot of traffic and likes and whatnot. That, in turn, means these pages become financially valuable. The operators of these pages later sell the site on an online market, and somebody makes a lot of money of your good will.

Plus, these pages and such get converted to some sort of lousy product advertisement, and then a few months down the road you and friends get spammed.

Charming, no?

Obviously, the people who do these sorts of scams deserve a really horrible place in hell. Really, using the nation's grief to make a buck. I don't know what the criminal penalties are for all this, but I hope it's extreme.

So, go ahead and donate money through a known, reputable organization that you've researched. Show your support for the people of Newtown.
But ignore those prepackaged Facebook memorials that are popping up in your feed over and over again. Most communities hit by tragedy post information about reputable organizations on their Web sites, so check that out, according to Technorati.

I noticed the Town of Newtown, Connecticut has information on their Web page on how to donate, how to help.

That's the best way to ensure your support is really felt. They sure need it.

Incomprehensible Newtown Massacre: A Few Thoughts.

Like everybody else in America, I can't get my head around the Newtown, Connecticut school massacre, in which 27 people died, including 20 young children.

A mother comforts her daughter after
the Newton, Ct. school shooting. Photo by
Melanie Stengel, New Haven Register

The news channels have been on for 24 hours now, trying to explain the unexplainable. It's too much for me to get to the heart of the matter. It's too big. Too baffling. My thoughts have gone around the edges of this, touching upon just a few of the millions of issues, concerns, thoughts, prayers this all leads to.

We don't know what led Adam Lanza, what could lead any human to kill innocent young children.

Most people who are seriously mentally ill people,  holding vicious grudges or harbor white hot anger don't spray bullets into crowds, especiallly when the crowd consists mostly of kindergarteners.

I was listening to an NPR report last night on the profile of mass killers. The problem is, millions of people have the same mental traits as these monsters, yet these millions of people never hurt anyone.  So how do we weed out , in advance,   the people that would cause such heartache. You can't.

Of course we hurt for the families of the people who lost their children, their joy. Nothing we say and do can help, really. I know it's our responsibility to make some good come of this, but obviously no amount of good will fix this. The world, unfortunately is much worse for this.

 What would have become of the children had they been allowed to grow up, thrive, live?  Many of them would have contributed wonderful things to the world. We've all lost that.

I also worry about the police and other emergency responders who raced to that school.  Yeah, cops are tough, paramedics are seasoned, but not tough enough or seasoned enough to live with the horror of those poor children, gunned down. Let's hope they find the peace they need.

As an aside, I want to especially congratulate the cops and responders who led the children out of the school, and had them cover their eyes as they did so, so the children wouldn't have to see the carnage they were seeing. These responders surely spared these kids a lot of mental trauma.

One of the best things I saw rattling around social media yesterday was a link to the Mr. Rogers Company, which offered help and how to talk about something like this to kids. 

The best part of the link is this quote from Mr. Rogers:

Mr. Rogers passed away ten
years ago, but left
behind comforting words
for situations like this.

"When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.' To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother's words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers - so many caring people in the world."

As in every American disaster, there's been a huge outpouring of help for the people in Newtown. I know. Because I looked for the helpers on the news and saw lots of them.

But now I have to go negative. There are a minority of people who insist on not helping. To make things worse. To further their agenda. Yes, I know there's a renewed debate on gun control. There's that. Some of the gun control debate is healthy. Some not.

However, I really want to touch on people who are even more vile with their agenda. People like Bryan Fischer and Mike Huckabee are going around saying the reason this happened is prayer was taken out of the schools and God doesn't go where he's not wanted so he didn't protect the kids in that school when the shooting started.

What sad lives these people live if they think a God would be so spiteful that he's allow a bunch of innocent kids to be killed. What these people are really after is a theocracy, and they're on a religious war to bring us that weird, right wing form of Christian theocracy.  And they'll stoop to something like this to advance their agenda.

Next up: The gays did it. Some of the same people who say God was kicked out of schools will repeat the nonsense we hear in every disaster: That God is killing our children, our innocent people in shooting sprees, hurricanes, tornadoes and floods because many of us are accepting of our gay families, friends and neighbors.

We're loving thy neighbor. But I guess that part of the Bible isn't important to the likes of the religious wing nuts. And I'm sure they're offending the vast majority of Christians who are good, loving and giving.

Oh, and by the way, I'm not aware God has been kicked out of schools. Organized, coerced Christian prayer has, because there's a variety of religions in this nation, in our schools, and we have to respect that. Even if we don't like somebody else's religion.

People are free to pray silently, however they want, to whatever diety they want, in our schools. The following sentence is going to sound inappropriately flip,  but it's heartfelt: I bet there was a lot of praying in that school during the shooting spree.

Now,  there's a lot of praying going on across the nation and world.   I bet, I hope, a lot of those prayers will be  answered.