Monday, June 20, 2016

(Un)Comfortably Numb

I was an Army brat, and so we bounced around a lot when I was a kid. I went to three different high schools because of my dad's job. I don't think anyone can do that and not be a little bit of a brat. For two-and-a-half years, for what was the end of middle school and the first half of high school for me, we lived in Orlando.

Orlando.


I was 15 when we left, so I didn't know much about nightclubs (a little, but not much). It was a place of Disney (the scene of even more heartache last week), and of short drives to the beach, and -- if I'm being totally transparent -- the backdrop to one of the more difficult times in my life until cancer. I was a 14-year-old girl who found my place with the wrong crowd, skipping school regularly and threatening to leave my family for my much older Puerto Rican boyfriend. It is a place without many fond memories for me, somewhere I try not to think of too often.

And yet.

I don't keep in touch with anyone from that time, but I still checked the victim list from last Saturday night's atrocity to see whether I recognized any names. Most of the dead were my age or younger. I didn't know anyone of the 49 victims personally, but I still grieved for such a grotesque loss of life: for the 2-time cancer survivor mom who was dancing with her gay son and took bullets for him, for the 19-year-old from Arizona starting a new life in a new town, for all of them.

This isn't about me, or my memories, or my sliver of grief compared to what those victims' families and friends must be feeling, compared to what the LGBTQ community must feel. My friend Aaron wrote that he is having nightmares about being shot in a bar. He doesn't feel safe. He can't sleep.

This is not about me, and yet it's about all of us.

I had an easier time talking to Quinn about why we can't have another baby -- because "mommy got really sick when you were little" -- than I will have when it comes time to talk about why tragedies such as Sandy Hook or massacres like what happened in Orlando keep happening in our country. On Twitter, one mom said she had to tell her kids, they deserved to know why they were having lock-down drills at school. I dread the day I have to strip away Quinn's innocence even more than I already have.

This mass-killing wasn't just about our shitty gun laws. Or about a homegrown terrorist claiming allegiance to ISIS to mask his own cowardice. It was also a hate crime against a particularly vulnerable community that has seen more hatred than most. As my friend Beth put it:

My social media feeds are mostly one-sided, filled with calls to change our country's gun policy (a vote for some changes are happening on the Senate TODAY, but are unlikely to pass given the political climate in Washington right now), and filled with support for the LGBTQ communtiy. In a sense, I have self-selected to be sheltered from the hate and from whatever nonsense Donald Trump is spewing at any given hour.

But none of us are immune to attacks like the ones in Orlando, Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, or Charleston. None of us are sheltered from that. We are no longer safe in our schools, our movie theaters, our houses of worship, our night clubs, or at our jobs. How's that for freedom?

I don't usually get political on here, but enough is enough. I can't on the one hand have this space where I have a voice that people actually read, and on the other not speak up when something seems so intrinsically wrong in our world. I had to talk to my son about cancer, hear that big scary word come out of his little boy's mouth, tell him over and over again why I have to have scans that prevent me from being around him for hours at a time, and crush his sense of security that his parents will always be okay.

I do not even one iota want to also talk to him about how evil some people in the world are, how some people hate others for the color of their skin or for who they love, but especially how as a country we watched as 20 six- and seven-year-olds were gunned down at school, and a Congresswoman and her constituents were shot in a parking lot in front of a grocery store, and then another 49 souls massacred while they were DANCING, and we DID NOTHING. Let's do something. November is coming.

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