Middle Ground

Every time there is another mass shooting in America I feel compelled to write.  Most of the time I give up before the post does more than cycle around in my head for a day or two.  I am frustrated.  I am stuck.  And I am on a loop because we never come to an end to these stories.

There is always a new one, always the same useless responses on all sides, and always inaction.  Gun people circle the wagons and deflect to tangential issues, gun control people ramp up rhetoric that further alienates the gun people, random people change their Facebook statuses and post sympathetic preprocessed words to make themselves feel like they've done something, when in fact they are more likely removing themselves further from being productive due to the false sense of involvement.  The discussion goes nowhere.  Nothing changes.  And we wait for the next news story and start all over again.  I've stopped feeling like my words contribute anything to this morbid dance.

This weekend I had to tell my kids about the shootings in Orlando.  I kept it simple: At least 50 dead that we know of and there is no reason "why" that will make any sense.  This is what happens in our country.  This is what we allow to happen in our country, and I'm not sure what the reason "why" is for that either.

However, today I am writing because maybe in this case I do have something to offer.  I'm in a position to write about this dispassionately, because I am not absorbing this tragedy.  I can't do that right now.  Sandy Hook about ruined me.  That story made me physically ill and continues to tear at me if I let it in.  I think as caring human beings we have to exercise our empathy with important stories that aren't our own when we can.  We should feel devastated by accounts of the Holocaust, and slavery, and child abuse, and 9/11, and any number of other horrors that people seem compelled to commit upon one another for reasons I can't fathom.

But we can't live there all the time.  We have to live our own stories and create good to balance the horror or what is the point?  I could choose at any time to wallow in the sadness of past or present.  It's easy to go there.  If feels virtuous at times to go there.  But it is not usually productive to go there, so today I will not.  My knowing details from Orlando will not change it.  My tears will not make it better.

But maybe some clear thinking will.  Media--social and otherwise--is nothing but emotion on all sides from what I can glean today while trying not to absorb much news.  I am setting myself apart from this deliberately for my own sanity.  Here are my thoughts.

Human Sacrifice

It's one thing to volunteer one's life for a cause.  It's another to fail to protect innocent people from the lethal consequences of your cause.

One year from Sandy Hook and I can't look at the news.  I can't be dragged down into the emotional turmoil that felt as if it was tearing at me from inside as more details of that tragic day unfolded.  It's too much.  It's too sad.  And it doesn't end.

Last year I tried to sort through my thoughts in a post that (for me) went a bit viral.  It gave me hope that others felt the same confusion and anger that I did, and that change might happen. 

It won't.  Because among the things I've learned since Sandy Hook, I've come to realize how deeply fearful Americans can be, which combined with our stubbornness and our willingness to cling to what appeals to us even if it's irrational sets us up for bad policy again and again.  Combine that with commerce and power and marketing and pseudo-patriotic machismo and we will remain a danger to ourselves and others for a long time to come.  It boggles my mind.

Because there are lots of rights and concepts that may be good to argue about in theory, but when the reality is the brutal, senseless deaths of children, I don't care about the abstract anymore.  I care about those children.  I care about my children.

But apparently the potential death of my children is not worth any inconvenience to people who like their rights the way they are.  Nothing will change because too many have concluded the cause is worthy of human sacrifice.  I just don't see why simply being an American, though, requires we all be part of that deadly lottery.

Something

We had guests in our house from Christmas Eve to the day after New Year's.  It was great.

It's been quiet here during the past few holiday seasons since we moved into our new house, but this was the first year on this side of the street where Christmas felt like it should.  The table was set for 16 for my brother's birthday dinner and my mom cooked up a storm.  Children decked out in butterfly wings pranced about the house, people laughed and talked and shared stories, we played a little music, and cranked up the record player and danced to the light of the mirror ball in living room at every opportunity.  It just doesn't get much better than that.

We spent part of New Year's Eve cutting snowflakes.

I'll get to that in a moment, but first you have to see something funny.  In the last few hours of 2012 we played our own family version of Pictionary with my parents, brother, and his fiancee.  We were in two teams, and each team wrote up a list of clues for the other team to draw, so we can personalize the game to our family.  It's always fun, and I laughed until I cried.

(Here's my brother holding the white board still as Quinn draws a pretty good plate of spaghetti.)

My Ten Cents on Guns

I am heartbroken following the news about the children and educators shot to death in their school in Connecticut recently.  It's beyond horrible and impossible not to get emotional about.  My son curled up in my lap at the end of that day, exhausted after the happy work of kindergarten and then picking out a Christmas tree and hanging stockings and untangling strings of lights.  He fell asleep almost as soon as he nestled into my lap there in the dining room where I was trying to get some tasks done at the table.  Such a sweet, perfect, innocent face, freckles across his nose, breathing softly, safe and innocent and alive.  I burst into tears thinking of the parents who weren't going to get to hold their children anymore and wondering how someone could look into such a face as my son's and choose to destroy it.  I struggle every day to err on the side of compassion whenever possible, but I have very little to spare for people who harm children.  As the most obvious of baselines I would hope we can all agree that protecting children from brutality and vicious murder is a worthy goal of our society.  Just because there is an emotional component to this position doesn't make it less valid because arguably violence is damaging to many levels of our well being.

I've written before how I believe there is a distinction between rural use of guns versus their role in densely populated areas.  I still think that's true, but today I am thinking about cities.  Because I think we have come to such a dangerous and twisted place that I don't even understand the arguments coming from people about why we should all have such easy access to guns.  We need to stop and reassess without being immediately defensive.  We need to weigh the truth of what is happening now against our preconceived assumptions of what we want or think we deserve.

Because if we have reached a point in our society where the murder of twenty children in their school seems like just the unfortunate price we must pay for a particular interpretation of an amendment of our constitution, then something is very wrong.