Friday afternoon I came home from running errands all morning around town. I was a little on edge, awaiting my grades to come in from my finals and was in what I would say is a fairly terrible mood. I barely had any time to go from doing my errands to having to go straight to work.
I hopped on facebook for a few before having to hit the road when I kept scrolling through the masses of folks posting their grievances and condolences. Now, sometimes people can be extremely cryptic on facebook, and its a fairly reliable, but inaccurate place to find your news. Reliable in that, if such a tragedy should occur, fourty of your friends will immediately post and ask a general question. For instance, several months ago an earthquake happened back home. This is news because nothing that exciting ever happens in Maine. So one by one, people gathered to facebook and twitter to ask the same question, "did we just have an earthquake?!"... now I'm the kind of person who would just assume based on what I had just felt beneath my feet, and the thirty questions before mine, that we had an earthquake... but the masses on facebook don't all seem to agree with this sentiment.
So coming back to my original thought... having scrolled through several dozen statuses with not one bit of useful information I had to seek out through my news sources such as msnbc or cnn, when I finally came across the tragedy that had been unfolding all morning while I was out moping over a c in physics. While I was out Christmas shopping for my girlfriend and other loved ones.
While I was out there, living, twenty six year olds were not. Seven adults were not. While I was out there wondering how the people I bought presents for would like my gifts on Christmas, there were now twenty seven families who were no longer going to be Christmas shopping, they were going to be casket shopping.
Immediately I posted something about gun control.. my immediate thoughts were with the families.. but admittedly so, I also thought about guns, and violence, and the fact that this is yet another situation in our country (even within weeks) of a young man, seeing no alternative but to lay all his grievances out on small children. This is another case of another young man, who needed access to a system that had denied him. They denied him, and they failed him... They failed us.
I did get some reactions I was expecting. Instead of this being a time in which people are mourning over the loss of 27 people, it becomes a conversation about gun control, and the mental health system. And to be perfectly honest, I think this conversation needs to happen... But there are those who process their thoughts and emotions differently than others, perhaps more of an internal conversation and sorting. And there are those of us who process out loud.
So between those two "settings" of processing, there is not much room for in betweeners. People are becoming outwardly furstrated and lash out at those who do not express the same sentiments or feelings. This is a time for grief and a time for reflection and yes perhaps this is even a time for a discussion of what gun control actually looks like. Perhaps this is the perfect time to really look at our nations mental health system and figure out how we can serve everyone in our community to best serve every ones needs.
But these conversations will not happen over night, and frankly, some people just aren't ready. These conversations also won't happen on two extremes of a coin, and they certainly won't happen if we internalize that gun voilence is always directly relative to mental health, because then it becomes an hand in hand situation, and it denies so many other issues we face today. Young men in our country are at war with one another. This idealism of masculinity has got to change.
So the world is supposed to end on Friday. I hope it doesn't. But even if it does... I need to begin to live my life in such a way that I am constantly loving everyone in my life. I need to remind those people that I love them. I need to express more compassion and more understanding.
