I keep thinking about my kids too, and about how in my years of volunteering at our neighborhood school in NJ, I have hidden in closets many times with terrified little kids during active-shooter drills, or how my husband’s cousin’s son is a Parkland survivor who hid in a closet not from a drill but from a real murderous psychopath.
No one ever, ever, ever needs to even think about this kind of thing in Europe. Ever! It seems quite literally insane to everyone I know here that Americans have to worry about such a terrible thing as being gunned down by a random fellow citizen. And I say this from a country that has the third-largest per capita gun ownership rate in the developed world. (Waaaaay behind the US are Canada and then Switzerland.) Turns out that when you give people training, require background checks and insurance, ban assault weapons, and put all guns in an EU law-enforcement database, you get essentially no gun violence or suicide. Who’da thunk it?
Oh, my gosh. I have, purposely, been paying significantly less attention to the news (and less time online, generally). Somehow, I had managed not to hear about this. I assumed your post must be a commemoration of Sandy Hook. I guess it's just the last shreds of my naivete speaking, but...while there's depravity, obviously, in any shooting like this, an elementary school, in particular, is such a different level that Sandy Hook seemed to me, at least, like a relative aberration. Now this.
And I think of that building full of children in Ukraine, and all the other children in Ukraine, and, well, all the children all over the world, and I realize my error. The Just World fallacy is a fallacy for a reason. There's no special category for children, no matter how much I wish there were. No special category for me or my loved ones, nor for anyone else's. The world is not just -- it never was. And I forgot that lesson, yet again, though I know better.
Your piece was beautiful, and you are utterly right. Being with my son today, cuddling and laughing with him -- *this* is privilege of the highest and truest form I will ever know. None of this, or any other part of life, is guaranteed. It is entirely too easy to take for granted, and tragedy is ever a devastatingly pointed reminder why we mustn't. Even as the outsiders, we can take that reminder in. And given our privilege, I think this much, at least, we owe.
My kid woke up in the middle of the night last night wanting comfort, and I stayed with him for a long long time just holding him close.
Thank you. My response today was to spend time with children. And hold them close.
I keep thinking about my kids too, and about how in my years of volunteering at our neighborhood school in NJ, I have hidden in closets many times with terrified little kids during active-shooter drills, or how my husband’s cousin’s son is a Parkland survivor who hid in a closet not from a drill but from a real murderous psychopath.
No one ever, ever, ever needs to even think about this kind of thing in Europe. Ever! It seems quite literally insane to everyone I know here that Americans have to worry about such a terrible thing as being gunned down by a random fellow citizen. And I say this from a country that has the third-largest per capita gun ownership rate in the developed world. (Waaaaay behind the US are Canada and then Switzerland.) Turns out that when you give people training, require background checks and insurance, ban assault weapons, and put all guns in an EU law-enforcement database, you get essentially no gun violence or suicide. Who’da thunk it?
Oh, my gosh. I have, purposely, been paying significantly less attention to the news (and less time online, generally). Somehow, I had managed not to hear about this. I assumed your post must be a commemoration of Sandy Hook. I guess it's just the last shreds of my naivete speaking, but...while there's depravity, obviously, in any shooting like this, an elementary school, in particular, is such a different level that Sandy Hook seemed to me, at least, like a relative aberration. Now this.
And I think of that building full of children in Ukraine, and all the other children in Ukraine, and, well, all the children all over the world, and I realize my error. The Just World fallacy is a fallacy for a reason. There's no special category for children, no matter how much I wish there were. No special category for me or my loved ones, nor for anyone else's. The world is not just -- it never was. And I forgot that lesson, yet again, though I know better.
Your piece was beautiful, and you are utterly right. Being with my son today, cuddling and laughing with him -- *this* is privilege of the highest and truest form I will ever know. None of this, or any other part of life, is guaranteed. It is entirely too easy to take for granted, and tragedy is ever a devastatingly pointed reminder why we mustn't. Even as the outsiders, we can take that reminder in. And given our privilege, I think this much, at least, we owe.