It’s January 14, 2011. I woke up at 5am this morning. The sun wouldn’t come up till 7 something. I stared into the dark. I thought about the recent tragedy that took place in Tucson, Arizona last Saturday. I didn’t catch this news breaking story on the day of the shooting. I didn’t catch the name of the shooter whose picture is slathered all over the media.
Over the week, I’ve taken in the face of this man and the tragedy he orchestrated in bits and pieces and sound bites. It was purely by happenstance that I had tuned into the televised memorial service while searching for something intelligent to watch on TV, when I saw President Obama on the screen. I stayed there and watched the offering of his elegant eulogy for the victims of this shocking, but not unusual crime in America.
How this particular shooting has a bit of celebrity to it is clearly because a United States Senator was seriously wounded, and which has hit the pulse of Americas in unimaginable ways around the issues of our constitutional right to bare arms. Arms being the operative word here, causing me to think of my arm and yours, and how our limbs are in reference to killing machines.
Anyway, in my silent soliloquy this morning, my thoughts shifted over to the parents of the shooter. I tried to imagine the incomprehensible darkness they must be sitting in right now; the questions they are asking themselves -- the what ifs? The shock of what occurred, has undoubtedly caused a shift, alternating from sharpness to fogginess, I would image. Invariably their world and ours has been turned upside down. That what has occurred to these people is happening to all of us. That we are inseparable; that one person’s head chatter affects us all. Further, the back tracking in our memory bank, might take us to that fork in the road many of us have come to in life, that maybe we should have chosen the other one, rather then this one that day on the way to the beach last summer?
One friend said to me about the murder that took place in front of the supermarket, “It’s scary.” I agree. Daily we are bombarded by choices -- what to wear, who to see, what to eat for dinner -- should we order in or go shopping for food, could be the next news breaking story.
Invariably we are all a part of the bigger question of what occurred in Tucson last week. It would behoove all Americans, I believe, to beg ourselves the question, why must we carry guns? They’re killing us…
Mahmoudah Young,
Brooklyn, NY
No comments:
Post a Comment