Together

I was running earlier today and thinking about this post and how I was going to write it but now that I'm sitting here on my bed with my laptop, I'm sobbing hard and I can feel my dinner traveling back up my esophagus in emotional rebellion. I wanted to write about yesterday's tragedy and so I looked up some articles on it and... and... I saw a little girl in the line up with her hands on the shoulders of the child in front of her, and she looks like my Katie. Her mouth is wide open in a primal wail of desperation and fear and I can't take this. I can't. But we can't keep turning away because it makes us uncomfortable. We need to face this head-on, together.

"Together" is the word that I want to focus on in this post. I keep hearing so many different opinions about what happened yesterday and why they think it happened. I find it fascinating that when something tragic happens that we need to find a reason for it and someone/thing blame.

The God-lovers are blaming the absence of God in the school system. The God-haters are blaming God him(it)self for "allowing" this to happen. USA-haters are making blanket-claims over the American people as if 100% of them are ignorant and pro-guns. If there is a God, his view of us would look like this: we are all standing in a crowded elevator shooting at each other with whatever hate-filled ammunition we are allowed to carry.

Of course we need to find a solution because when we feel pain, our first reaction is to make it fucking stop. I'm not saying that it's wrong to place blame. I may have had dreads but I sure as hell am not a "love all people no matter what" spineless hippie. Sick people need to be held accountable for their sickness. But why in the wake of such a horror do we all have to start hating on each other?

Each time we stand back and point fingers at someone, we segregate each other and isolate ourselves. Gregory David Roberts writes in the book Shantaram: “Prisons are the temples where devils learn to prey. Every time we turn the key we twist the knife of fate, because every time we cage a man we close him in with hate." Each time we take a step back and point our fingers outward, we fence ourselves in. 

When I go to Katie's Christmas concert next week, I'll be sitting among the rest of the parents of the children in her class. Do you think that all of us share the same religious views? Or the same opinion on mental illness? Do you think we all believe, every single one of us, that the lack of gun laws are the reason that this tragedy happened? No the fuck not. But the commonality between us is that we are all sitting together watching our babies sing "Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright." We are mommies and daddies who would rather be burned at the stake than have anyone hurt our children and yet instead of linking arms and kicking hate in the testicles, we turn on each other.

I don't have an answer and if I did, I'd be rich and I wouldn't be sitting on an old Ikea duvet cover in fake LuluLemon yoga pants eating no-name popcorn. Pointing fingers at each other won't make this go away and neither will sitting around a circle singing "Kumbayah" while Jimmy hands out joints stop these tragedies. But please, please, can we stop blaming each other. We will get to the bottom of this, but we can't do it alone. We need to work together.