I was hopping like crazy at work last week, the result of which was about as positive an outcome as I could have hoped for (notwithstanding the fact that some of the frenzied activity was my own dang fault as I had to clean up a mess or two I had unwittingly caused) but I can’t really get into a detailed blow-by-blow about the experience because most of it concerns security protocols that I probably shouldn’t be blabbing about online. Suffice to say I was busy last week but I expect things between now and the holidays to be markedly quieter.
Maybe just as well, since with work-stories struck from the list of potential post material, I can devote today’s post to other things; I can pivot from things I shouldn’t talk about, even though I kind of want to, to things I don’t want to talk about at all, but maybe I should.
I was finishing up my Friday post just when the news was breaking from Sandy Hook Elementary. I was so stunned I’m pretty sure I went immediately into denial, not only because of the horror of what was happening but because of the where. Newtown is where my father, step-mother, brother and sister live now, where my aunts and uncles and cousins have lived for decades. My sister was a student at Sandy Hook five years ago. I was just visiting my dad’s house in Newtown, with my family, back in July. My wife called me in a minor panic, fearing the worst, and I immediately assured her that everyone we knew was fine. Partly I was confident doing that because there was no reason to think any of my family would be at the elementary school on random Friday morning, and partly because my brain was elementally incapable of countenancing any other possibility.
I did eventually get hold of my dad and confirm that everyone was all right. Except, of course, not everyone was all right; maybe my family's physical safety was never endangered, but everyone was shaken, and that of course pales in comparison to the worst of the worst. Part of my initial denial was a belief that the very earliest reports would turn out to be exaggerated and overblown, that even if many people had been shot not all the injuries would be serious and maybe most if not all would survive. But as the afternoon wore on obviously those hopes were extinguished by reality, and by the time I was on the phone with my dad there was just raw shock and hurt, trying and not particularly succeeding to understand how this could happen, at all, in the community my extended family calls home, in the world we all live in.
I thought about blogging in some fashion about the shootings on Saturday, but I didn’t, thought about it again on Sunday, and didn’t again. It should be pretty self-evident that I’m vastly more comfortable blogging about really silly, inconsequential nonsense I take a personal interest than about matters of great depth and import that affect us all. I don’t know what I could say about the shooting that would be worth the time it would take for me to type or you to read. I can come out strongly against the murder of innocent little children but I would also like to believe that such a stance more or less can be assumed without fanfare. I can say that my heart breaks for everyone who lost loved ones on Friday, especially the parents who grieve for sons and daughters not much older than my own children.
That’s one part that’s so hard to reckon with when I try to put something into words. It’s the nature of my thought process, maybe the nature of writing itself, to relate things to my own frame of reference. I can’t help it. I can’t think about the mothers and fathers of Newtown without wondering how I would feel if my son were taken from me violently and without warning. The wondering doesn’t get very far at all before my brain slams down impregnable steel doors and says, “No, no, absolutely not, not even hypothetically, do not torture yourself with something guaranteed to drive you screaming directly out of your mind.” But even so, I feel like it’s unfair to dwell even for a second on my own feelings, when I have the luxury of imagining something that is all too real for others. If I write about anything, I should write about the survivors. But I can’t write about something I don’t understand, and I don’t have the first clue how to comprehend either what happened on Friday or what is supposed to happen now for those who have no choice but to go on.
And yet. To say absolutely nothing, to go on blogging about books and movies and football and pets and getting ready for Christmas and jumping through social and professional hoops at work, just feels wrong. It feels petty, as if I could not care less about even acknowledging that a deeply disturbing tragedy just occurred. It’s tempting all the same, because as I’ve already said, if I resolve to say something I’m at a loss as to what I’m supposed to say. There’s no international charity I can link to for pledging to relief efforts, no political movement I can urge people to support to guarantee this never happens again, no profound life lesson I wish everyone would draw from the collective experience. I’ve spent just about all of my life looking for bright sides and silver linings but I don’t expect to be able to pull one out here.
There’s an old line that often echoes in my head: sometimes it just feels good to be human. In context it’s a reference to acting with compassion even when it might be more materially beneficial to do the opposite, especially for someone who is rarely compassionate at all, for whom embracing the things that unite us all is a costly luxury. I don’t believe I’ve ever considered the flipside of that philosophy before, the notion that sometimes it feels terrible to be human, sometimes compassion and a sense of unity brings with it overwhelming pain and sadness. Clearly right now that is very true. But above and beyond how it feels, good or bad, I can never doubt that it’s important to be human. And that’s about all I can manage to wrap my head around right now. Both on behalf of those most deeply affected by it, and for my own sake, I’m devastated by the tragedy visited on Newtown, CT. That is, and should be, completely unremarkable, because you can’t call yourself a human being and not feel the same way. And I judge it better to stand up and be human and say so in this moment than to say anything else, or to say nothing at all.
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