Numb

I'm numb. Because this keeps happening.

We go to Bridgewater Plaza several times a year. It's a place my children love. Two people I didn't know were murdered there in cold blood, doing the same job that so many of my friends do. All because some asshole couldn't get a handle on his anger and he had access to a tool that allowed him to impose his hatred onto the world.

And it'll happen again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

That's why I'm numb.

This one's weird because I've spent so much time in the exact spot where they were murdered. I've watched my nieces and nephews grow up there, and my own children delight in going to the arcade. My own sense of place was shattered in exactly the same way that it was when the massacre at Virginia Tech happened and exactly the same way it was when my friend's cousin was murdered by an angry man with a gun when I was in high school.

How much longer until we have one of these murder-suicides happen here? I keep wondering when one will happen at City Council, or on the downtown mall. 

I want to spend today just thinking about these issues, thinking about how to protect my children, how to talk with their mother and stepmother about how to talk to them about this. 

Journalists are killed all the time throughout the world and we turn our backs on it. I don't want to turn my back on this. I want somehow for all of us to sit down together and talk about anger, talk about ways to help people cope with it. Because somehow we're churning out a whole lot of men who seem to think the world owes them something, and when they don't get it, they pick up a gun or guns. 

And we'll keep avoiding the tough talk and I'll be quiet again because I'm not supposed to talk about this.