A letter to Aiden, 2-year-old left an orphan by Highland Park shooting: 'We failed you'

Every mass shooting in America is a collection of horrors.

In the wake of the Fourth of July parade massacre in Highland Park, one horror unfolded slowly, beginning with good Samaritan social media posts showing a curly haired toddler believed to be separated from his parents in the chaos. Then news came that the boy had been taken to a police station and eventually placed in the arms of his grandfather.

Then the tragic reality: Both of the boy's parents were fatally shot, gunned down around him. He is now orphaned, the innocent face of a country that has allowed the ghastly to become commonplace.

I felt like I owed Aiden an apology

Aiden McCarthy is 2 ½ years old. The Chicago Sun-Times quoted the boy’s grandfather saying that Aiden’s dad – Kevin McCarthy, 37 – died shielding his small son. “He had Aiden under his body when he was shot,” Michael Levberg told the newspaper.

Aiden’s mother, Irina McCarthy, 35, died next to them.

'I was shot': Talking to survivors of the Highland Park shooting left me humbled

Like many, I wasn’t sure what to do with this horror. I felt we – me, this country, all of us – had failed him so completely.

I felt I owed Aiden an apology. So I wrote this. And I hope someone close to him saves it so he can read it when the time is right.

A letter to Aiden

Dear Aiden:

You don’t know me. Nor should you. My hope is that by the time you’re old enough to read this, by the time the people who’ve raised you feel you’re ready, these words will hold some kind of value.

I want to say I’m sorry this country let you down. You came into the world with two wonderful, loving parents. And they were taken from you because the rest of us adults couldn’t get our acts together and find a way to stop shootings like the one that happened July 4, 2022, in Highland Park. The kind of horrific, preventable shootings that could turn what should’ve been a day of wide-eyed wonder into a waking nightmare.

Our failures let that day change the course of your life. Because we couldn’t agree on things. We couldn’t get enough people to tell common sense from liberty. We couldn’t keep guns built for killing people out of the hands of people bent on killing.

You became an orphan because we are a nation that is failing its children.

About 30 miles south of where you lost your parents, in Chicago in 2022, kids were losing parents to gun violence almost daily. Over the long Fourth of July weekend when your parents were killed, a group called the Gun Violence Archive reported that about 280 people across America were killed by guns, and that more than 700 people were wounded.

I hope when you read this, that seems shocking. I hope to God it’s no longer normal. I hope there’s no longer a need for a group that tracks gun-related deaths. I hope stories like yours have become rare and shocking, rather than what they are as I write this: all too common, white-noise tragedies drowning out words of reason.

I can imagine you reading about these years and asking: How could people be so stupid? How could they be so stubborn? How could they not care?

I can’t answer those questions. I don’t know the answers myself. I do know many others are asking them as I write this, large majorities if you look at opinion polls. We’re wondering what it will take, what more we would possibly need to endure to see that a right added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791 could possibly apply to a modern-day young man buying high-powered military-style rifles that can kill and maim dozens in a matter of seconds.

Whatever questions we asked, whatever actions we took, they weren’t enough. They didn’t save your parents. They weren’t enough to protect the path you and so many other children were meant to travel.

We didn’t speak up loud enough, didn’t protest enough, didn’t organize enough, didn’t fight hard enough in the face of a minority opposition replete with money and power and, in my opinion, devoid of conscience.

We failed you.

And I’m so sorry.

My hope, as you read this, is that we fixed things. That we got to the roots of the gun violence epidemic and started to heal.

But at this moment, I don’t feel hopeful. We won’t stop trying, but it may well fall to you and your generation to fix the mess we’ve created, to return sense to the senseless.

It isn’t fair. There’s nothing fair about your life or the lives of any child who has lost someone to gun violence.

We failed you. I failed you.

And I pray, and believe, you can do what we couldn’t: Make this world a better place.

Sincerely,

- Rex Huppke, July 6, 2022

Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Twitter @RexHuppke and Facebook: facebook.com/RexIsAJerk

More from Rex Huppke

Highland Park mom's text: 'We're hiding.' Then she and her daughter fled in terror.

Highland Park's July 4th parade massacre: The horrifying commonness of American shootings

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: America failed Highland Park orphaned toddler Aiden McCarthy