tragedy

lifted from A Series of Unfortunate Events, book 2

The shooting in Colorado is a tragedy. I can’t imagine what it must be like to have lost someone due to the shooting, or to even have been there when it happened. I’m glad I live in a country that when tragedy strikes, everyone seems to reach out with condolences, sadness, and sympathy. The goodness of humanity shines through.

That said, I see Twitter and Facebook lighting up with pictures, ribbons, article links, special hashtags and updates related to the shooting. I pray this isn’t a tragedy fad, like Konya or school shootings, where people change their profile picture for a week and then everything goes back to normal, no lesson learned. I hope that people don’t become overzealous and start becoming ‘afraid’ to go to the theater, or think that theaters aren’t ‘safe’ now.

Because in all honesty, bad things happen everywhere. We had a special lockdown plan at a center I worked at once because a kid’s father (who was on a restraining order) might come to the building and force his way in. When I worked at a retirement home, we learned there was a shooting at another due to a disgruntled employee. When my cousin was in grade school, a kid brought a gun to school and was flashing it around. A custodian at the high school I student taught at got stabbed and mugged while taking out the trash at the end of the night, right outside the gym. The store my sister worked at got robbed at gunpoint (my sister was not on shift). A coworker of mine had a daughter who was killed during a shooting spree at a local clothing store. There was a shooting at a parking lot in Arizona in 2011. At Husband’s old apartment, we’d get woken up at 1:00 in the morning due to gun shots, followed shortly by police sirens. The city I live in has had over 200 deaths so far this year, and every week the death toll climbs. There have been several shootings at colleges, and countless more at high schools.

Yet all these places remain open, and we continue to attend them. Maybe there are new safety measures in place, and hopefully people learn how to react in such dangerous situations. But we keep calm and carry on. The dark and the light, and the hope that the light continues to outshine the dark every time.

And because I feel J.K. Rowling truly understands the ideas of death, living, light, and darkness, a couple of Harry Potter quotes:

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban