As Glass

Ice storm. It is cold and difficult. It took about half an hour of warming up the car to cut through the stuff.

It was really a hard day all around. I haven't watched the news. I listened to NPR on the way to school and I do know the generalities of the school shooting in Connecticut. We had a two hour delay today, but I got to school pretty much at the normal time. I walked in to the nearly deserted school, and it wouldn't leave my mind...Of course it wouldn't leave my mind... I hold this place to be a place of safety and of love. To have the thought of that shattered in such a way is to lose a great deal. I believe in a public consciousness. I believe that people together create an understanding and that our hopes and futures are built on this. School is meant to be a place of building understanding and trust.... of learning about life, about who we are and about how to negotiate through what life hands us successfully. The world took a terrible hit Friday.

It is a complex and tragically awful thing that happened. It is not as simple as gun control or no gun control. It is a mishandling, a terrible and impacting result of loose ends that came together in the worst way possible. We can call it evil, and it is, but it is also human. We can jump to call it other than that. I know that I want to do just that. Call it something that is beyond us. Make it so foreign as to be completely alien. But here it is in our laps...one state away.

I have avoided any pictures of the shooter. I don't want to see his face. I don't want to draw conclusions based on his race, wealth, position, expression. I am not entirely sure why. I just don't want to see him. I want him to be this amorphous human that exploded everywhere and destroyed the absolute thing that I hold to be most dear.... children. Henry's age. God help me I just don't want to see him. I don't want to know why... Can we really ever know why? Isn't the question too desperate? Too beyond my understanding?  I don't want to hear news programs jump to the best fitting conclusion that they can come up with, because I know that it will be so much more than that. I don't think we can just write it off as mental illness... Of course it is mental illness. It can't be anything other than illness.

I walked into school today dreading the questions that might be raised. I have no answers. No real answers. I want to assure them that they are safe, and statistically, they are very safe. But deep down I am questioning the same things they are. Not that the school that I work in isn't safe. It is. But that deeper question. Am I safe? Are we all safe?      The unthinkable just happened.

Are we safe?

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