After Orlando, We’re “Reeling” Once Again
I hate crying on the treadmill at the gym. I’m already red-faced and gasping from my workout, so things get pretty ugly when tears are added to the mix. Plus, no Kleenex, so, yeah, lots of snot.
I know I’m not the only one who cried watching the news this week. I’ve been reading about Orlando’s nightclub carnage in my local paper, and I’ve tracked the unfolding horror on NPR, too. But when I became a mom nearly 14 years ago, I stopped watching the news. If I did see clips from the current news cycle — about shootings, earthquakes, airplane crashes, house fires and anything, anything to do with children suffering — I was in for a sleepless, anxiety filled night.
This morning, however, my treadmill faced three TV monitors set to three different stations, so I switched back and forth as I climbed an ever-steepening hill. It hit me that both my hill climb and the newscasts were Sisyphean in nature: I could jog in place like this forever — heart racing, blood pressure rising, tears falling — without making any actual progress. Watching coverage of the weekend’s massacre, my heart raced, blood pressure rose and tears fell — and it felt sickeningly familiar and futile. Like Sisyphus wrestling endlessly with his boulder, we all know how this week’s horrifying event will inevitably play out. In fact, when it comes to our national response to gun violence, it feels like we’ve already made our list. Now we just check it twice:
· Tears, outrage, shock and anger. Check.
· Outpouring of global sympathy and support. Check.
· Thoughts and prayers from local and national leaders. Check.
· Facebook profile photos updated: “We are _____” (today, Orlando. Tomorrow, TBD). Check.
Here’s a word I keep reading and hearing, one that jumps out at me every single time we wake up to a new national horror: reeling. The country. A community. Families. Reeling.
Except we can’t really be reeling. Because as Fessick tells Vizzini in my favorite movie, The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
How can we be reeling from an event that, while it varies in location and scale, happens here with terrifying, infuriating, mind-numbing, gut-wrenching regularity? “Reeling” suggests we were unprepared for, if not completely blindsided by, an occurrence that was utterly unforeseen, unpredictable, unimagined — and unimaginable.
Come on, people.
In our great nation, home to Newtown, Aurora, Colorado Springs, Charleston, San Bernadino, Orlando and the site of the very next not-yet-announced gun massacre, “reeling” is a luxury reaction we don’t get to have. Save it for people in countries with sensible gun control when terrible, truly unexpected violence shatters their community. Here, where the only questions that make any sense when it comes to gun violence are who, what, where and when (and not “why”), we’ve chosen a different fate: pushing an immense, indestructible boulder of continuing tragedy up a steep, slippery slope.
When the boulder rolls back down, thundering as loudly as bullets spraying across a bass-thumping, pulse-throbbing, joy-filled nightclub, we’ll just wipe the sweat from our brows as if we’ve been dancing our hearts out on a hot, late recent Saturday night in Florida.
And then repeat.
This article originally appeared in the Marin Independent Journal.
Willow Older is a nationally and internationally published writer and a long-time professional editor. She lives in Northern California where she runs her own editorial services business and publishes a weekly newsletter called Newsy!.
