America, Hollowed Out
Friday, February 16, 2018
by Reed Galen
The massacre at a high school in Florida reminded us of the fragility of life and of the cowardice of our elected leaders. It also demonstrated that we’ve built a collective shell to protect our psyches from the horrors we now witness all too often. That protection, constructed by our minds to block out the worst of the “what ifs” many of us experience also has the effect of turning dead school kids into statistics rather than young men and women taken from us while still in the ascendant.
The students in Parkland, Florida are not facts and figures in a newspaper chart or an interest group’s infographic. Those lost, and those that remain, were the flower of their communities, their generation and their country. We don’t treat those lost so senselessly with the reverence they deserve, nor do we honor their memories with anything more than “thoughts and prayers.”
And while their parents and friends may, somewhere far, far in the back of their minds appreciate our devotionals, for them nothing will ever quench the impotent rage of knowing their child was stolen from them. Nothing will assuage the guilt they will feel knowing they did nothing more than kiss their kids on the head and send them on their way to school and somehow the years of love and support wasn’t enough to protect them.
The latticework of the lives, families and friendships of those 17 students and teachers is shattered forever. Time does not heal all wounds. Words, words far more thoughtful and heartfelt than I write here today, will not bring even a moment’s relief to the moms and dads, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of the victims in Florida, or in Las Vegas, or in Orlando or in Sandy Hook.
The loss of these kids, will only invoke the memories that most parents have when thinking about their children. The bright-eyed smile behind a giant mug of hot chocolate. A father’s amusement at invoking an eye roll in his teenage daughter with some silly joke. Once considered fleeting moments, moms and dads will now grasp those memories tightly, trying to reconstruct even a second of the joy so many of us take for granted on a daily basis.
A friend of mine said, just last week, “You will never know anyone as well as you know your kids.” We’re there from the moment the moment they arrive in this world and regardless of their age or stage in life, they will always be those we would do anything for — including laying down our own lives. They are literally a part of us; we see the best and worst of ourselves in them. There is not one parent in any town that has experienced a similar horror to Parkland that, if given the opportunity, would not stop time and take their child’s place.
Most of us will never experience the pain of a child lost, from illness, accident or murder, as too many do today. To think we can only grieve for our neighbors, friends and fellow Americans lets us off too easily. We owe it to them and to the lost promise of their kids, to stand up and decide that enough is enough.
We can’t say when, or even if, this epoch in our country’s history will end. When it does, though, we must each ask ourselves, when we saw kids gunned down at a school that could have been our child’s, did we do our part to bring it to an end? Did we think, really think, about what it means to worry about sending our own kids to school.
Knowing what others have lost, are we willing to just sit idly by and say, “Well, that’s horrible,” or will we work within our communities, our counties, our states and our country to being to address the myriad issues — legal, social and cultural that have led us to this place?
If it were your child whose class photo they were running on the evening news, what would you want us to do?
Copyright 2018. Jedburghs, LLC
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