Wednesday, October 4, 2017

We are all victims

Last Friday evening, I was sitting in the car with my son in the parking lot of a local fast food restaurant.  It was raining outside and there was a catchy tune on the radio, Pumped up Kicks.  We were waiting to meet some friends for a Friday-night fish fry.  In no hurry to get wet, I decided to keep the radio on and annoy my son by trying to sing along to a song whose lyrics I didn’t know. This usually elicits an eye roll by him, to which I spontaneously burst out in laughter and then try to botch up the lyrics in a more hilarious way, launching us into a cycle of increasingly exaggerated eye rolls which lead to expansive peals of laughter from me.

But this time my son stopped me in mid-singing.  “Mom, do you know this song is about Columbine?”

“Huh? No….????”

He picked up the lyrics at just the right place to sing along, “Listen, ‘better run better run, faster than my bullets...’”

I immediately reached for the off button, silencing the music, “That is sick, I don’t want to listen to it.”

“I thought you liked it, you were singing along to it!”

“It was a catchy tune. You just took it away from me.  I never want to hear it again.” I opened the door, and turned to lock the car.  “Come on, let’s go.”

“Well they say it’s about Columbine, I don’t know if that’s true.”

“Whatever, It makes me sick to think about.  Do you know how awful this is?  Don’t you ever…” I’m not sure where my thoughts are going.  No, I lie.  I know exactly where my thoughts are going, to an image of my son running in terror down the long corridors of the idyllic American high school, the place that I was overwhelmed by when I visited it for the first time a few weeks earlier.  I see all those white faces of hundreds of kids streaming through the halls, past the army-green lockers, not knowing what to do with the bundled mix of feelings that come with their budding self-awareness.

“Mom, don’t worry, I’m not going to go out, get some guns and shoot up a school of kids!”

I halt, mid-track and spin around to meet his eyes. I no longer care that it’s raining.  “It is not YOU I am worried about.  You go to school with a bunch of white kids who have grown up under I-don’t-know-what-kind-of-crazy-home-circumstances. Not everybody has it as good as you do.  I worry about you being a victim!”

“Oh.” He looks down toward his shoes, silenced.

“Yeah, just be careful who you hang around with and what you hear.  If somebody sounds like they’re going off the deep end, its not funny.  You need to tell somebody.  Its worrisome.”

“Mom, its just a song!”  I know this is his standard diversion tactic to get me to stop talking.  It means the message has gotten through, and he is dealing with it by making light of it.


Later that night when I’m lying in bed listening to the sound of a nearby train break the nighttime autumn air, I replay the conversation in my head.  I think about the silence of the many months that have passed since the last mass shooting event. I don’t know if Pulse was 6 months ago, 12 months ago or 18 months ago.  I just remember that after it happened somebody telling me, “It was the largest, and there will be a next one that will become the largest, and nothing will have changed.”  I think about that for a minute.  I pray that it won’t be too close to home when it happens.  I pray for my son’s safety and I drift off to sleep.  Thirty-six hours later, a new record has been set for number of deaths in a  mass shooting in the United States.   

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