Sammy is a pale and furious vision. He is shirtless, young, scrawny and utterly enraged. He shrieks as he runs toward the small white gate that serves as the thin membrane between Short Term 12 (his group home) and his ridiculous idea of the life of an autonomous child. He is ferrel. He is angry. He is, as they say, “throwing a fit.” He is also dead in his tracks, suddenly caught, held down and screeching.
For a while he flails like a fish on sand but only for moments. It subsides while you watch. Mason asks him if he almost has it out of his system, which is clearly the case. Grace tells him to let it pass. It does. Now if we were all wise enough and smart enough, that one scene would have taught us everything we need to know from the movie “Short Term 12.” Thankfully, we are not yet that wise because the rest of the movie is so worth it.
When tragedy hits, we ask why. It is visceral, perhaps even instinctual, and almost involuntary. For the past 48 hours I have mostly sat quiet in my house, mostly alone, listening to people process an unthinkable event, a moment of real evil. How did this happen? How could this happen? Thankfully one of my friends just said it outright, “How can there be a loving God in a world like this.” We want to understand, we want to explain, at least in hopes that we can make this happen less often. We dwell on the moment, on the suffering, and ask ourselves, “How can this make any sense.” But this violence does not make sense. It never will, nor should it. There will never be a thought pondered or a sentence uttered that could ever make any one of us pause and say, “well, yes, now I get it.” This is simply evil. There is no sense inside it at all.
I was terrified the first few times I went to