Too much Newtown info? Don't click here

Photo: Washington Post

Friday, June 14, is flag day. It’s also the six-month anniversary of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

At this point, after all that's been said about that mind-boggling tragedy, what should we remember most about it? What is most important to mark as essential? And, what upsetting details should we be glad are already fading from our memories?

Do we need to count Sandy Hook Elementary School's dead students and teachers, again?

Twenty kids; six adults.

Is it necessary to say again how many bullets the shooter fired in the four-minute killing spree?

154.

When considering the cynical political ramifications of the bloodbath’s aftermath, must we shake our heads in frustration, again? For our own sakes, do we really need to try, AGAIN, to understand what the heartbroken families of those lost first-graders have been going through?

Regardless of your political persuasion, the answers to the last two questions are: Yes and yes. And, considering what subject matter Eli Saslow was writing about in his piece for the Washington Post, “After Newtown shooting, mourning parents enter into the lonely quiet,” there were any number of ways -- as a writer -- he could have swerved out of control and run into a ditch.

Yet, that doesn’t happen.

Still, that doesn’t mean Saslow’s excellent article is for everybody. If you can’t read anything longer than a blurb, forget it. If, on Friday, you don’t want to lower the flag in your heart to half-mast -- remembering the face of a little boy (Daniel Barden, pictured above) who ran along side his school bus, to race it each morning -- then better not to click here. 

Can't remember the last time I thought something ought to win a Pulitzer Prize immediately after reading it in a newspaper, but I sure did on this one.