I’m not sure how to write this. I’m not even sure how to wrap my head around this. It’s happened again. Another school shooting. Another set of statistics. Another set of families reeling in grief, not sure how they will keep breathing. Another school in shock; another community bereft and angry and hurting.
Or as we say, here in the USA
home of the brave and land of the free:
Friday
This time, for me, is different.
Every time for me is different.
And the same.
I am a mother. I never once thought, when sending my kids to school…never ONCE, that there was a possibility that they would ever come home dead. Never.
Once.
Until Columbine.
And 9/11.
And the DC sniper.
The first came when my youngest daughter was still in middle school, attending a small parochial school in Northern Virginia near my workplace. It was a horrifying event. A once-in-a-bloody-lifetime-event.
Or maybe not so much.
As I’ve written before, I was less than three miles away from the Pentagon (in another government building) on 9/11. I watched the smoke rising from the building I had worked in for three years (retiring from the AF in the Executive Dining Room in 1993) and within whose walls many of my friends were working that day.
We were at war.
Within and without.
I missed the DC sniper by a matter of moments and a choice to get the groceries later at the grocery market at Georgia and Randolph Avenues in Silver Spring, MD. I picked up my daughter from her after school job, instead. We came back to find the police tape and the body bag in the parking lot, near my favorite parking spot.
I knew, then, that my sweet 16-year old daughter, and her sons and daughters were now living in a world falling apart.
We are at war.
Within and without.
It’s happened, again.
And before you can say
oh my God
Nobody will do anything about it
because someone is making money off it
and I don’t know how much more of it
I can watch and still keep breathing.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/jaylen-fryberg-shoots-students-at-washington-high-school-community-reacts/
