Not Here
When I lived in New York, in Manhattan, the morning news would often bring word of an overnight homicide. I would pause to hear where the body had been found, where the shots had been fired, and, once assured the location was, as it often was, down on the lower east side, or up in Harlem, or on the platform of a subway line I never took, I’d resume getting ready for work.
I was not alone in this habit. It was a way to cope with living in a city that could be dangerous. We’d reassure ourselves: oh, okay, not here, not in this neighbourhood, not where I live, or where I work. It’s over there, or up there. It’s sad, but I’m safe.
Early on, didn’t we cope with mass shootings in much the same way? With horror, but ‘not here’ relief? Angry, outraged, empathetic, but, well, it happened over there. Not here.
What folly.
One morning, Anderson Cooper appeared on television in front of the restaurant where I’d had dinner not twelve hours before. Some kid had shot his way through windows and bodies at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, a place I knew well.
In the wake of tragedy, people often say they never thought it could happen to them. That morning, I realized it’s not that people think they are blessed, or special, or set apart. It’s that no one expects Anderson Cooper to broadcast from their street. No one expects to be caught up in a media maelstrom. No one expects to drive down their Main Street between a funeral for still another child and a wall of police cars and media vans. No one expects the President of the United States to be sitting in a classroom of their high school working on words for their torn and bleeding community.
But more and more and more of us find ourselves in a similar position. Two more communities in just the last twenty-four hours: El Paso and Dayton. It’s here. It’s us. It’s now. It’s Anderson Cooper or one of his colleagues about to stand in our neighborhood.
After Newtown, the feeling was that the conversation would, finally, change. It did not. Agonized parents discovered that no one paid attention if it was ‘only’ about gun control, or ‘only’ about the lives of tiny children, so they added mental health to the equation. To little effect.
What folly.
I grieve. With each new shooting, I relive that December morning. I am not alone. Survivors and residents of Newtown and Las Vegas and Parkland and Columbine and Orlando and more, and now El Paso and Dayton, and the list will grow, do the same.
This is our national consciousness. This is what we share.
