Most people are good

I think it's a form of survivor's guilt that makes it so hard to turn off the coverage of tragedy. We think that perhaps if we steep ourselves in the information, in every tiny gleanable detail, we can take on some of the sorrow, maybe bear some of the brunt for the people who are hurting the most.

Or maybe we're looking for some detail that will make it turn out to be not so bad as we had thought. Some tiny panacea for our global pain.

Well, this time it was so bad, and no amount of detail is going to fix things. Knowing more about the tragedy is not going to help me deal with it, and trying to imagine how it must have been is not going to improve matters. There's no common quota of tears - by shedding my own I'm not helping someone else shed less. Everyone is crying.

I'm only looking at the news once or twice a day, and not clicking on a headline unless it really has new information. It was only last night that I saw the names and the ages and the fact that they were first-graders, and as soon as I did, I scrolled quickly on because I couldn't immerse myself in those details. They were all Dash. They were all my son the first-grader. People keep saying "They were babies," but because he's my eldest I know that they were big kids, with new teeth, and bright ideas, and responsibilities, and far more understanding of the world than we give them credit for.

And I'm not going to tell my first-grader about what happened, if I can possibly help it. He'll say "Could that happen in my school?" and then I'd have to lie and say "No, they have procedures and checks and sign-ins so that people can't come in if they're not supposed to." And then he'd say "Well, didn't they have those things at that school?"

What can we do? We can demand gun control, we can campaign for better mental health services. And we can turn off the news - not because we don't care and not because we're unfeeling, but because life has to go on, where life is there to do it.

Most people are good. Most people are healthy. Most people are sane. We have to keep believing that. It has to be true.

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I'll be offline for a while because we're travelling tomorrow. Back soon with cheerful stories of flying with children and holiday hi-jinks.

Obligatory

On a day like this, I don't really want to blog about it. I don't have anything original to say. I don't want to pretend that my feelings are anything special, or that I have words that can help. I don't. I'm just one more parent scrolling through a Facebook feed that's filling up with advice on how to talk to your children about tragedy, wishing it would go back to being an ordinary Friday the way it was this morning. But I blog most days - to skip it today seems like shirking, and to talk about something else would be unfeeling. So I have to talk about it.
 
When something bad happens, my instinct is to distance myself from it as much as I can, so that I can believe it would never happen to me. It's in a different part of the world, a different country, a different area, at a place I would never be, happening to people who couldn't be me.

I'm pretty sure this is human nature, to convince ourselves that we're safe even if others aren't. They weren't just unlucky, they were in some more inherently risky environment. They live near a volcano, on a fault line, in the tropics, in a place where bad things happen. Not here.

Today's tragedy didn't happen here, but my list of reasons why it couldn't are dwindling. It happened in a nice town near a big city, on this side of the country, not a million miles away. It happened to children in an elementary school; just the sort of elementary school my son attends.

My intitial gut reaction was that we should go back to Ireland. My second was that homeschooling would be the safest option. (I have nothing against the school system. I don't blame the school, in any way. I just felt that if these things are happening in schools, then I don't want my kids to be there.)

I have no intention of homeschooling and we're probably not moving back to Ireland any time soon. Terrible things happen, no matter how much you try to protect your loved ones. I could homeschool my children on Achill Island, and they could fall off a cliff instead.

The people in my town went through a terrifying time ten years ago when the so-called "Beltway sniper" was shooting very close to here. I can't imagine the stress of bringing your children to school, putting gas in your car, getting off a bus - and knowing that someone doing exactly that had been picked off by a gunman lying in wait, just a few miles away. That went on for weeks. Anyone who lived here then can't even put up my feeble "It would never happen here" defense - they know better.

I don't know what an optimist is supposed to say today.

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But you can go here and shed a few tears for a joyful reason, maybe, and think that the world isn't so bleak after all.