The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Promise celebration raises $1.5M
It was a night of celebration and a night of sadness, a festival of lights and a recollection of darkness, a star-studded room filled with music, touched by silence.
The benefit, which raised well over $1.5 million for Sandy Hook Promise on Tuesday night at the Plaza Hotel in New York City, was not the group’s first highkey event, but it might have been the most poignant for its timing.
There was Sheryl Crow, long a supporter, offering a debut-week performance of “The Dreaming Kind,” her haunting tribute to love and childhood exuberance, in honor of the 20 murdered children at Sandy Hook.
There was the former vice president, a national leader of gun control who is not, contrary to the wishes of so many in this ballroom, President Joe Biden. He and the parents who co-founded Sandy Hook Promise brought together National Football League royalty, Hollywood and business notables and friends to raise money, look forward in the never-ending fight for common-sense practices to end violence against children and, of course, to remember.
“It’s a huge mix of very intense emotions,” said Mark Barden, a co-founder of Sandy Hook Promise whose son, Daniel, was killed five years ago Thursday. “I found myself in the days leading up to the fiveyear mark remembering so clearly all the things I was doing with Daniel.”
That will never go away, of course, but in the noisy atrium of the Plaza Hotel ballroom, surrounded by so much support, Barden and the other family members found strength.
The Sandy Hook Promise movement, co-founded by the Barden and Hockley families, “is absolutely making progress,” Barden said, despite a lack of national gun-control legislation.
Previous fundraisers have been in Washington, D.C., in June — not at the anniversary of the horrible day at the emotional heart of New York’s Christmas season and on the first night of Hanukkah’s celebration of light and miracle.
There was an understated feel to the way people looked and dressed in the crowd of several hundred, and more than the typical sense of purpose.
“A lot of our employees live in Newtown,” said Indra K. Nooyi, CEO of Purchase-based PepsiCo and an honoree Tuesday night. “All of them were deeply impacted by the events in Sandy Hook.”
“It’s sad because we have to be here,” said Justin Tuck, a former New York Giants defensive lineman who retired two years ago to pursue an MBA at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. But, he added, “It’s a celebration because so many strong people have come together.”
He turned and greeted his old boss, the Giants’ third-generation owner, John K. Mara. Mara said he has not had any backlash in his pro-gun-control stance in National Football League circles, where many players are known to favor strong Second Amendment rights.
“I think it’s getting out of hand,” Mara said, referring to gun violence — not the rift in the NFL. “I don’t know how many more mass shootings we have to have.”
Nearby, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, wearing a suit and athletic shoes, declined to comment, saying only he was there to celebrate.
It was a celebration to be sure, alongside remembrance and the ongoing crisis of mass shootings. Two months ago, the nation’s worst mass killing in modern times at the hands of a shooter unfolded in Las Vegas. Just last Wednesday, the U.S. House passed a measure that would make it easier for gun owners to carry concealed weapons from state to state without regard to local permit requirements.
Fighting that vote might have been on a lot of minds Tuesday night, but for Sandy Hook Promise, the goal is a broader, less confrontational look at violence prevention — through education and encouraging people to talk and speak up before tragedies happen.
The group just unveiled a new, 90-second public service video: A chilling satire of a news report the day before — not after — a shooting at a school. The “reporter” asks a young mother with a small child what she will tell him and she says tearfully, she won’t be able to do that. “He’s not going to make it.”
“I’m very uplifted,” Mark Barden said. “We have saved lives. We’ve stopped school shootings.”
Fittingly, the new song by Crow only skirts the political debate, instead invoking a paean to innocence.
“I turned off the news again tonight/It’s getting hard to watch everyone fight,” the song opens. “So I’m giving it all I’ve got/ There’ll be no more wasting precious time/Nothing’s ever going to change my mind that we’re beautiful inside/Maybe I’m just the dreaming kind.”