Thirteen years ago, I sat transfixed in front of my TV screen while live video showed the Columbine High School massacre–just a few miles up the road. My children were in another school that day–in the same school district as Columbine, but a town or two over.
My children came home that day–shaken, but intact.
Today, I once again sit in front of a screen–this time I’m several thousand miles away and it’s my computer screen–as I watch more streaming video of the Century 16 movie theater carnage. This time in Aurora, CO. Again, a few miles down the highway from where my children and their families are beginning their day. Once again, my children and grandchildren are safe. For now.
Peripheral violence has danced around me all too much. Followers of this blog know that Jeremy and I left the Lakeside community of Ajijic when the Mexican drug cartels infiltrated, bringing their signature blood baths along. We wanted to be in a place that–although couldn’t offer any guarantees of safety–at least had a higher probability that we’d live to see our great-granchildren.
Now I fear more for the future that they will have more so than the one that Jeremy and I face.
Isn’t it ironic that our friends and family are concerned so much about our safety because we “live in Mexico?” Yet, in my former home state, people (and so many of them young people) are periodically massacred. In school…at a pizza parlor…in a movie theater. It makes me want to call my kids and say “Get on a plane. Right now. I don’t care how much it costs. Come here where I can closet you in my home and know that you are safe. We’ll order take-out and watch Netflix. Every day…for the rest of our lives”
Clearly, going out for pizza and a movie is much too dangerous.
But I can’t do that. Because–motherly instincts aside–it’s nuts. If fear controls our lives, then what have we?
So I think positive thoughts and tell myself that “what will be, will be” and there’s not a whole lot I can do to change the course of the future. And my heart bleeds yet again for my neighbors who have lost loved ones and for those who are clinging to life after the shooting.
And I am grateful that my children are once again safe from harm. I know this because they’ve all posted on Facebook in the last 24 hours–sparing me the effort of having to make what has been come to be known in our family as ” the not-dead check-in call.”
But I can’t help but wonder. What lesson is it that we’re supposed to be learning that we’re just not getting?
Filed under: Mexico
I put this on my Facebook page as your story and question is very thought provoking and I hope to see some ideas on what the answer might be. My thought: Is it possible that we have become too over populated? Or is this just “quintessentially American?” Is our society so used to reaching for the quick panacea; do we want our way in such an immediate fashion that we erupt into violence? Have the children no coping skills, so sense of fair play? Is this because adults seem to have lost the art of negotiation, of compromise or the complete inability to see the other’s point of view? Or are we all just going crazy?
Lisa,
I have thought all of the things you expressed–thought them until my thinker has been exhausted! I don’t want to turn this into an argument on gun-control, but these words by Anne Lamott posted on her FB page resonate with me–not so much as to determine a reason for such insanity, but to help those of us who simply don’t know what to do in the face of it. (https://www.facebook.com/AnneLamott–not sure if the link will work from here, so below are her words):
Today the whole country saw what is true: that there will be an endless succession of mass-shootings, and no one will be able to stop this from happening, because of the NRA’s money, power and influence.
I mean this nicely. I’m not saying it in a judgmental way.
The NRA had convinced a majority of legislators that they will be ruined if they try to renew the Assault Weapons Ban. It has convinced the right wing that gun control people like me are out to take away your 2nd Amendment rights.
That is only partially true.
If I were God’s West Coast Rep, my PREFERENCE would be that crazy, mentally ill men not be able to buy rifles and hand guns, period. But I am just one aging, bleeding-heart peacenik, and I would settle, gladly, for the law making it harder for crazy, mentally ill men to buy assault weapons.
I swear to you gun nuts: you get to keep the rifles and handguns, even if you are mentally ill! I promise. We just want the semi-automatics. God is my witness.
Unfortunately, this is probably never going to happen. The NRA will make sure of that–you know it, I know it. So that’s a little discouraging. A crazy man could buy an assault weapon, with a magazine that holds hundreds of rounds, and kill 134 people next month at a public event, and the NRA would STILL terrorize legislators into voting down the Assault Weapons Ban.
One tiny, tiny fly in the gun nuts’ argument, though, that law-abiding citizens are safer against the crazy man with the gun, is that something like 45% of American households have guns, and yet not ONE citizen has ever shot and stopped a crazy man mid-mass shooting.
There’s nothing much anyone can do, legislatively, especially not in an election year. It’s like that famous Shel Siverstein cartoon of the two prisoners chained to the wall of the prison, and one of them saying to the other, “Okay, here’s my plan…”
Mass shootings will continue to be a common part of the landscape in America, at movie thetares and malls.
Where on earth do we go from here?
All I can think to do is what we’ve always done. We work towards peace and non-violence. We register voters. We create art and music in the face of madness. We light candles. The praying people pray: Lord have mercy. The meditating people meditate. We create Love and beauty as radical acts We take care of the poor, and teach people to read and write. And as Molly Ivins would urge us to do if she were still here, we bang our pans. We rise up, peacefully, take to the streets and we bang our pans and we make a ruckus, and we stop this war, too.