A Saturday Evening Post

“Oh, what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!”

For many of us, the words of that song bring back memories of eggnog, and presents on Christmas morning with family. Unfortunately, that is not the case for those who watched the Waukesha Christmas Parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin at 4:30 in the afternoon of November 21, 2021.  For them, that familiar, happy melody is changed forever.

Perhaps you can try to imagine how the song is changed for those heard that song being played by one of the local schools’ marching band as the driver of a red SUV plowed through the crowd. Certainly, we cannot comprehend what it was like for those who played the song moments before he left a scene of destruction. Actually, they couldn’t imagine it either:

      A few weeks after the parade, the marching band reconvened for practice. They were not prepared for what would happen next. After tuning up their instruments, their fingers began tracing the opening chords of that familiar song, and it immediately took them back to that moment. All of the shock and panic erupted, tears began to roll down faces, fingers and mouths froze on their instruments, and the whole room dissolved in a pool of emotion. Band members couldn’t go on with practice. They just packed their instruments and cried together.

This happened about a year ago, and for many, that moment began a slow path to recovery. Healing Hearts is a local organization that specializes in grief support, typically dealing with death, divorce and incarceration. Last winter, they added a group just for the parade victims and observers.

       You might think that things are progressing, people are healing and a year later it is all better, but that’s not how grief works. There are more people enrolled in the parade support group now than there were last January. Some things get better and then we have a moment that brings things back.

        As Healing Hearts was preparing to resume with their fall session, another event was unfolding that once again made it fresh for so many people: The pre-trial events in the prosecution of the driver began in late summer.

        Likely, you have seen some of the events that have happened in the news. Once again, we likely can’t imagine how this affects those who experienced the parade event first hand. This trial has been hard for those who witnessed it, as the perpetrator has elected to be his own defense counsel. This court case has been unlike most, as he attacks judges, jury, and court staff, but worse yet, he also gets to directly confront those to whom he caused so much pain. It has been an emotional time for the Waukesha Community.

       Major events like this impact our lives forever. Many of us remember what we were doing when any major event occurs in our lives; what smells and sounds we associate with it. A friend told me her child is still afraid of red cars.

       Let’s go back in time a little: to 30 A.D. to be exact. Until the moment an innocent man was executed, a cross was a sign of a heinous crime committed. It was the standard form of capital punishment; the Roman equivalent of the hangman’s noose, The French guillotine, or the more recent electric chair. Those who had witnessed one of these awful executions forever associated it with grotesque images.

What is our connection to this cross? We make golden crosses and hang them from our necks. People hang them on walls of their homes, get tattoos with this image, and we decorate the memorials of loved ones with this symbol. Why?

Sadly, ‘Jingle Bells’ will likely always remind some of the terror they felt that day, but not all changes are for the worse. One spring day, Jesus, a Jewish man who had done nothing wrong, hung on a cross, and forever changed the meaning of it. Pardon my mixed metaphor, but he flipped the trigger, and that symbol has come to mean hope and comfort for so many who find freedom from bad choices and forgiveness for past mistakes.

Maybe in time, ‘Jingle Bells’ may come to mean something different for those who have been traumatized by its memory, or, maybe not. For now, the band has decided they won’t be marching in the Waukesha Christmas Parade. The current events of our community make the memory too fresh to allow that at this time. 

In the wake of events like these, it is common to attach the word ‘strong’ to the name of the community where the event occurs (BostonStrong, WaukeshaStrong, etc.) it comes to symbolize the feeling of overcoming that, in all honesty, many people don’t feel will ever completely happen. Maybe we should modify that phrase.

In our case, perhaps we just aim to be #WaukeshaStronger, knowing that because of Christ, we can keep moving in the right direction.