another friday
started gently; finished with
senseless tragedy.

small school children met
insanity’s dark intent
outside all reason

Our tears together
our brief sobs won’t change the world
or right the dreadful.

Meet anger softly
Smooth fear with small kindnesses
because “you’re like me.”

Once the ‘what’ is decided, the ‘how’ always follows. We must not make the ‘how’ an excuse for not facing and accepting the ‘what.’ Pearl S. Buck

Like everyone else, I’ve been trying to answer the big question: why.

The only thing I came up with is this.

If you’ve spent your whole life being anxious and uncomfortable, feeling not in control, when the moment of breaking comes, making everyone else anxious and fearful and at risk makes you suddenly solid and in control of everything.

So much of what seems like anger and rudeness I see on a daily basis is really fear and feeling not in control. I try to tell younger folks this. It’s hard to show empathy when you feel attacked, contradicted, challenged etc.

Maybe that’s why these murderers commit suicide after causing such pain and destruction: they achieve at last that moment where they seem to be in control and there’s nothing that can happen afterwards that will be as good as that.

I stopped on the way home to look at what I knew couldn’t be snow.

A little further down the road I saw more white stuff that was different. Frost being squeezed out of the ground.

I woke up around eleven and looked quickly at the news and there was a report of someone killed at a school. Sad, I thought, wondering if a child had brought a gun to school or if there’d been some gang activity somewhere.

Then I went off to get some food and a lot of coffee. I went back to Nassau, to the little diner there Thom’s. Three separate people asked me computer questions because you know, I work at the Apple Store… it was pretty funny, especially given how sleep deprived I was. Normally I would have chatted a little but would have caught up on my facebook and twittering and news reading.

Went to a store and then home, feeling all right but knowing I was sleep deprived still, even after the chunk of sleep I’d had. I had a small computer project I wanted to get to the point of being able to get it printed and thought I’d be awake enough to do it.

When I got home I set up the laptop downstairs because it was a little warmer there. Up popped a message saying that 20 small children had been killed by a shooter in their school. What?

I sat down on the glider and just gasped and sobbed. The cats all came over and sat down next to me, so I must have been pretty scary to them and I tried to pet them. I walked around a little and cried some more. I looked at the NYTimes and it turned out it was the same story I’d seen hours before.

It said the president was going to talk in a short while, so I turned on a radio and tried for live video which failed. I could hear the president trying to speak calmly and not doing well and it was clear he was pausing to compose himself. Later when I saw it, he was wiping tears away.

I listened to a press conference by a lead police person who made it clear they weren’t ready to give out too much information.

I had thought to write some blog posts about the trip to see the Hobbit and the shooting stars and my funny funny trip to the diner and all and now the world wasn’t a very bright or funny place.

Today at work, I realized that I was pushing all this away but it kept coming back in waves. I went to lunch and like every day, I looked at the NYTimes to see what was happening. What I found was that the whole story had changed again.

No, the murdered mother hadn’t been a teacher at the school and she had been shot at home, not at the school. And although there weren’t really any more details, that could only mean that the shooter had gone into the school only to shoot and kill children there.

I don’t have anything to say about this right now. Well, actually, I do.

The president and all those people who consider themselves as part of the congress need to stop posturing and do what’s right and best for the people they represent. I want someone who’s pointing at the second amendment to explain how that, which clearly points to the arming of militias in defense of the nation, can be interpreted to allow people to easily obtain and own semi- and fully automatic weapons and ammunition. We, each citizen, needs to demand that strong action be taken on a national level. And we, each person, needs to set aside violence and get it out of our vocabulary and comfort zone.