My sons bought their tickets more than a month ago. The younger one planned to see a marathon -- nine hours of Batman, all three movies, the last one starting at 12:01 AM. The older one was just going to the newest of the trilogy, at a suburban New York theater that sold out for its midnight show almost as soon as tickets went on sale.
Just like the theater in Aurora, Colorado.
With every tragedy we wonder "Could that have been me?" Have I ever taken that flight? Eaten at that restaurant on top of the towers? Sent my children to a school that but-for-the-grace-of-god could have been Columbine? Or a college that could have been Virginia Tech? Might I have brought them along to a shopping center to shake hands with their Congresswoman? Or let them go to a midnight showing of the hottest movie of the summer?
With each tragedy we measure how close we came, and give thanks that it wasn't a little closer.
Of all the searing images that have been flashing on screens this morning, the comments I can't get out of my head are in a blog post written by a young woman named Jessica Ghawi last month. Ghawi happened to be in the Eaton Centre mall in Toronto in June when a gunman opened fire in the food court. She would have been sitting directly in his sights if a sudden "panicky feeling" hadn't compelled her to leave three minutes before the shots rang out. "I can't help but be thankful for whatever caused me to make the choices that I made that day," she wrote.
Last night she was one of the dozen who died during the massacre at the Century 16 Cinema.
There was a 3-month-old baby boy among the injured, and a 6-year-old, and a pregnant woman. It was a movie based on a comic-book, and the audience was young, some because this was the film they had been waiting for ever since the last one, and others because their parents probably thought they would fall asleep during the show. All the victims, all 12 dead and dozens more injured, were each someone's child. Someone who would do anything to keep that child safe, if only life gave us warning signs, empty feelings of dread in our chests, to tell us there was danger looming.
Or, more to the point, if only we knew when to listen to those feelings. Because they are always there. Being a parent means always wondering if danger looms, if you have made the right choice, if you just missed tragedy. Every decision to let them out of our sight brings some shadow version of what Gahwi described, " a panicky feeling that left my chest feeling like something was missing."
Yes, we know the risks are small. There has been much written about how we are smothering our children, and worrying about the wrong dangers, and hovering and helicoptering, and cocooning them in bubblewrap. We are hurting them by listening to our constant "feelings like something was missing, " we are told. And, statistically, that advice is right.
But statistics don't mean a damn on days like these.
Because, after all, the roots of our foreboding lie in the days that make this one feel eerily familiar. We have watched this loop before, in Colorado, and Virginia, and Arizona, and Toronto. And while, on the one hand, we hear that the odds of a crazed gunman's bullet finding its mark in our children is infinitismal, as is the likelihood of abduction while walking to school for the first time, or sexual molestation by a stranger we trust to be alone with them, on the other hand we know the names of the children to whom that has happened.
We also know that while we are being reassured that the world is basically safe, and we are overreacting to the dangers, somehow a series of lunatics keep finding a way to get guns and aim them at our kids.
My son Alex went to his movie marathon last night. He came home safe and sound at 4 a.m., at more risk driving home than during the time he spent in the theater. At the last minute, my older son Evan decided not to go to the film at all. Could that choice have saved his life? Any choice can. Or not.
Tomorrow I will remember that I cannot keep them safe, no matter how many feelings I listen to and how many precautions I take. Today, though, I will hug them, and cry for the victims they might have been. I will get angry at the world that allows a midnight movie to become a massacre. And I won't let them out of my sight.
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The US is the only advanced nation without some form of affordable care available to everyone, yet we spend far more per capita than anyone else, mostly because we spend 30% of every healthcare dollar on bureaucracy resulting mostly from the needs of for-profit insurers to extract their profit from the system (not the profits themselves, the control they need to maximize the profits for their benefit). That's $500 billion spent on paperwork to deprive people of care so a few people can make money, rather than just paying for care.
I don't understand why every mother in the country isn't up in arms about that!
It is only after a son/daughter has persistent debilitating symptoms of a mental health condition that most parent's come to realize the 'help' is so sadly and dangerously inadequate.
Unfortunately, even then many parent's will internalize the mindset of their own culture and look the other way or blame their children for their illness.
I believe what we are not doing with compassion we continue to (in much more insidious ways) do with the heavy hand of potentially dangerous medications, what often amounts to incarceration, stigmatization and social surveillance. Pushing members of our society so far into the margins they no longer have a 'place' here.
I believe we need compassion not fear to guide a fundamental restructuring of our health care system and in particular our mental health services. Right now, one can have thousands of dollars spent on them for 'emergency' er visits, psych holds and medications yet not have access to simple therapy -- someone to talk to. Isn't it weird, isn't it wrong? The hardest thing to do for a 'loner' with mental illness is to get a mental health professional to talk to???
What is it about American life that creates these conditions? We don't do long national holidays nor do we promote vacations. Maternity leave is a relatively new idea. We do not have the lowest infant mortality rate in the world. We do have a very high incidence of mental illnesses...We are not the highest ranked in the world in education and our morals and ethical perspectives aren't even worth discussing since we built Gitmo and attacked Afghanistan/Iraq nevermind the rest of the ripoffs like the economic disaster... so we don't exactly promote morality or ethics... Our media is strange, violent and driven by sales and consumerism... what do we change to put this in perspective? Or do we just act like there is nothing wrong and blame the guns.... like the GOP blame the unemployed for being unemployed by calling them "lazy" and "drug addicts" and calling for drug testing of food stamp recipients....We blame the outcome and bailout the cause...
spare me the generalities@@
seems to me the focus should be on trying to figure out and prevent the type of chronic parent/child interactions that create these monsters. sitting around wringing ones hands and lamenting in fear and luelessness does bupkis.
If it's always someone else's kid, i think, we are automatically working from a base of fear.
Totally tho, a better understanding of the type of interactions and conditions that somehow allow for some to do and or become monstrous needs to be addressed.
Not mine... they have the common sense not to act ignorant and/or stupid.
H
It is not a matter of wanting a perfect world or being over protective.They need sleep,They don't need to be bombarded with this content.
Things can happen anywhere.That does not justify midnight outings for kids any more than it justifies owning assault weapons.
Some of my greatest memories as a kid were of doing things that we weren't 'supposed' to be doing. I do think our youth are overstimulated and sleep deprived but that said i also think they're losing a lot of their mobility.... it would be sad to deny kids that awesome time-out where they got to ...
It is not a matter of over-protection or wanting a perfect world.
Things can happen anywhere and at anytime.That does not justify family outings at midnight any more than it justifies ownership of assault weapons.