Please tell me we can recover innocence.

Yesterday, I was on the phone with my dad.  We were having a light conversation, trying to set up ichat so that he could watch my son paint a picture of his beloved Dino.

Then he answered a phone call.  And came back.  And told me that someone had been shot  inside of the John Marshall Elementary school.  My father was confused.  How did he never hear gunshots despite the fact that he shares a backyard with the school?  Screams?  The ambulance?  I shared his confusion, but for different reasons.

I sat at my son's mini desk in his mini chair and tried to process it all.  Shot inside a school?  An elementary school?  What do these parents tell their babies?  How do you explain to your six year old why the media is outside of his school?  While most six-year olds grapple with the concept of death, for too many kids, death via violence has become the norm.

So the small place where children can escape the struggle that is their life, get fed regularly, get heat and an education, is now tainted.  A crime scene.  They'll run around and laugh in a gym that was filled with running and screaming of a different kind merely hours before.

What does the future look like for these kids?  How do you recover a lost childhood?