How We Have Learned to Not Take Music and Relationships for Granted in the Wake of the Las Vegas Massacre and Other Mass Shootings
At 2 AM on Monday morning, my boyfriend turned to face me in our bed. I was mostly asleep, but I could comprehend what he was saying: “There was a shooting in Las Vegas. Two people are dead.” It wasn’t long before I fell back asleep, which I now realize was a luxury that 58 people didn’t experience that night.
A few hours later, our alarms rang to wake us up for work. “Now they’re reporting 50 people are dead.” I spent the rest of the day refreshing my feed on Twitter, trying to find out whatever information I could as the story unfolded on national news. I read dozens of pieces about the victims, so many that I know their names by face.
As someone with Panic Disorder, events like this infiltrate my mind more often than I’d like to admit. I am always quick to think of the worst, to leave a movie theatre if I sense tension, to constantly look over my shoulder to make sure I am not being followed. But when a tragedy like the one in Las Vegas happens, I feel it more than just in my head. I feel it in the deepness of my heart and in the pit of my stomach. I can’t stop thinking about all of the broken families, the children without parents, the boyfriends, and the girlfriends who will not be returning home to their significant others. I think about how everyone who survived the massacre on Sunday survived in the truest sense of the word, but they will never, ever be themselves again. They will constantly hear the sound of shots being launched at them for the rest of their lives — when a car backfires, or when a balloon pops, or when a firework lights up the night sky, they will be reminded.
I feel helpless. For the last few days, I have had to constantly keep myself in check, making note of all the ordinary day to day things I have done and realized how privileged I am to be doing them, because there are so many people who weren’t given that chance after the Route 91 festival, and they will never have the chance to do so again.
As upset as I feel, there is an equal amount of anger spilling inside of me. I am furious at the politicians who offer their condolences and prayers to the victims and their families. These are the same politicians who accept thousands of dollars from NRA contributions. The amount of hypocrisy and ignorance littered throughout their apologies is a slap in the face. At what point do innocent lives become more important than defending a centuries-old amendment? At what point do we stop repeating history and start saving innocent lives?
My brother is an usher at Madison Square Garden, working concerts several nights a week. On my drive home from work this evening, I had an upsetting scenario playing over in my head, again and again, one where I heard news of an attack not unlike the one that has just stricken our country. I thought about the anxiety of trying to get in touch with him, of trying to find out if he was safe. And then I thought about the possibility of never getting a response back from him. I thought of seeing his name like I’ve seen the names of the 58 people from Las Vegas becoming one of the many shared across articles and social media postings, listing him as a victim of some senseless act of violence that nobody was prepared for, but only because we chose not to be.
Not long after I arrived home, my grandmother called me and spoke loudly over the news. “Have you seen what happened in Vegas?” It is impossible to unsee it. “Please don’t go to concerts for a while. It’s sick what’s happening. I know you like them, but promise me.”
This is the reality we are living in. We have learned to not take music and the connections it brings for granted. It is the gift of sharing music that brings us all closer together — whether we are singing our favorite songs with strangers at concerts or sharing our most-played albums with a friend on a mix cd — until a person or group of people take that away from us. Today, I am mourning all of those lives lost in Las Vegas and at the Bataclan Theatre and at the Manchester Arena and at Pulse Nightclub. I’m thinking about how the greatest connections and friendships I have ever had have been founded on music. I cannot even fathom going to a place where I feel safest and most comfortably myself and having my life put at risk. I ache knowing that a comfort so real and so tangible has been stripped from so many at the hands of a terrorist and at the hands of gun-lobbying politicians and citizens.
The songs we love and the venues we grew up in feel like they will always be there for us, like they will save us, like somehow, in some strange and selfish way, they belong to us. They help us through the good times and the bad. And I know that’s what they will do in these sad and trying times, but damn if they won’t sound different, damn if they won’t make us long for the days we drove along highways with our windows down blasting catchy choruses, damn if they won’t make us think about how those were the days, the simpler kind, the kinder kind, the ones where all we heard was the music, not the sounds of bullets or screaming or crying that we hear with them now.