When I saw the first hint on Facebook, my initial selfish reaction was, oh no, what happened this time? I don’t want to know about it right now! My energy is good this morning I can’t take tragedy.
But of course I had to go find out.
Shock, grief, tears. What do I do with this? I wonder. The answer comes, light a candle , send healing and love to the families and those affected.
That helps. A little.
I sit back down to my work, write a little. I can’t focus.
Scrambling for meaning, for something, I scan more news, more reactions.
As I always do when these things happen, the refrain reverberates in my brain, “Why are we so broken?”
Why are we hurting so much?? What could possibly drive a 20-year-old kid (because, yes, that’s really still a kid) into a classroom with machine guns? What desperation? What untenable anger? What sort of dissociation from reality?
It’s so easy to go into despair. Or into a rant.
Why the fuck are we still selling people guns when again and again this happens? Over and over? Oh sure, guns don’t kill people, people do. But guns sure as hell help get the job done quick!
Yes, the anti-gun rant. I’m on it easily. But plenty of others are way more articulate, informed and eloquent on the subject.
Or this one:
Why the fuck do we raise our boys on video games that make killing sprees look like just another giggle? Manufacture giant plastic machine guns to give to 4-year-olds? Why do we desensitize our children from blood and guts and violence from the moment they can sit in front of a television set or computer game?
Why do we glorify war?
What have we done? And where are we going?
I close the computer, put on my running clothes. Head outside. A pall seems to hang in the atmosphere. A gloom. News travels like lightning, and though I’m 3000 miles from where all those children were shot, everyone I pass knows. A heaviness fills our auras.
I run. I breathe. I cry.
Later, in the shower the words arise:
More Love. More Love. More love.
Yes, less guns. Yes more attention and care to the messages we give to our children about the precious fragility of human life. Yes, to all of that.
But beyond and above it all. Overarching all of that:
More love. More love. More love.
Love to the mothers and fathers in Newton, Connecticut. Love to all those children who witnessed this carnage. Love to the shock and grief stricken members of that community. Love to ourselves.
Love to every precious being on this planet, living and dead.
And yes, love even to that boy who walked into a kindergarten classroom loaded down with semi-automatic weapons.
More Love! More Love! More Love!
Not as a simplistic solution.
But a start.
More love.
