I don’t have a quote at the beginning of this post.
I don’t have the energy to find one to be honest.
I am just angry.
Angry that we have yet another shooting, more dead kids.
God. More dead kids. And yet another cycle begins of outcry, of finger pointing, of a demand for change and thoughts and prayers. And I am here contributing to the noise again.
Thoughts and prayers.
Fuck that.
I am angry. Of course I’m mad at the man that shot up the school killing at this posting 21 people, 19 of them elementary school children. But, and I feel ashamed to admit it, I’m angrier at some random internet dude that posted on a Relevant article that we simply do not have the political will to change anything, that new gun laws wouldn’t work and it would only leave more children dead. He argues from a place of caution and he sounds reasonable. He hides behinds facts and figures, data he claims. But I know in my heart that he is just another guy who wants to keep his guns.
And so I hate him. And because I hate him, in that moment I hate myself.
And then I spiral. “How dare I make this about myself?”
“I am doing nothing.”
“This is pointless.”
I’m stuck in between a place where I do nothing, say nothing in order to somehow protect the sanctity of what happened. Perhaps by not being part of the outrage machine I actually AM doing something?
“But,” I think, “I could write a blog about it?”
Obviously you see which I chose. Perhaps this is just my own catharsis at work, selfishly trying to center this horror only on myself. I will say that it was really bad fucking timing to be a couple weeks off my antidepressant medication.
So I come back to hate. The shooter, the random internet troll and myself. But yet, the hate almost drives back the despair you know? Like a fire driving back the cold, I may be burning, but right now its the only thing I have to stay warm.
We have to stay alive. We have to stay warm. We need something.
While many are preaching “love” and “hope” to deal with this crisis, I cannot reach those right now. Each “thoughts and prayers” post I pass on my social media feeds just stokes the anger. Religion is a cheap answer for those who persist, and who knows if it helps the dead.
And yet I know that those people too are hurting. They are, like me, trying to figure out how to deal with this yet again, to figure out their part, to deal with the helplessness. While I hate them, they are no worse than me. Their “thoughts and prayers” are my “gun control laws.” I can’t blame them for wanting to frame these lost lives as part of a narrative in which we can make some sense of the senseless.
So what can I do? What can we do?
Anger is often the result of sadness that we either are not able to or cannot express well. In that way hate is similar when it comes to extreme grief and trauma. Quite simply our bodies know of no other way to express the level of grief in any other way.
Our bodies know that something has been damaged, broken, when our minds are still reeling and trying to determine how and what to do.
So I say, embrace the hatred right now. Embrace the extreme grief and the helplessness.
Somewhat ironically I have turned to Psalm 88. It is full of grief and lament and my favorite part is that it ends with this:
Your wrath has swept over me; your terrors have destroyed me. All day long they surround me like a flood; they have completely engulfed me.
You have taken from me friend and neighbor – darkness is my closest friend.
There is no happy ending, no resolution. It ends with despair and when children are dying, despair is the best thing we have.