The Newtown shooting makes us feel helpless. We don't need to be

Now it's December. Newtown. Twenty-six bodies, and what can you say? Again, some stories hit you so hard that after the initial mesmerising horror, your secondary instinct is to protect yourself, to shut the mind down, halt the imagination before it conjures the details that lurk between the brisk lines of the news reports. The sights, the sounds, the terror, the grief. I simply cannot bear to place myself in the shoes of those parents. To be racing for the school, feeling unreal, light, weightless, powered by gut fear alone. To stand and wait, and wait, and wait. To hear your child is dead. I don't have it in me. The news displays the faces of the children and I have to look away. That feeling, still relatively new to me, becomes overwhelming. The basic parental urge to protect. They are other people's children. Faces in photographs. Gone now. But still: the urge to protect. And I can't. I'm helpless. It hurts.

 By Charlie Brooker/The Guardian/more