Sick, sad world

Wow. I suppose in a strange way, the fact that what happened in Connecticut on Friday was literally unthinkable to so many people is a good thing....that we have not yet become inured to this kind of thing.

I will say the politicization of the event - which seems to happen with everything these days - makes me kind of sick. It was one person who decided, for whatever reason, to do an awful thing.

Life isn't safe. There are no guarantees in life. We can do our best to protect the people we love but in the end, horrible stuff can happen. Someone I care about got a diagnosis of cancer this week. While it's still early stages, this is someone who tried to do everything "right." Bad stuff happens.

There's some talk now of posting armed guards at schools. That thought makes me really uncomfortable.

I'm glad I was a kid when I was. We had fire drills and tornado drills, and I admit I had the somewhat-obsessive little-kid fear of both fires and tornadoes. I'm a little young for the duck-and-cover Cold War drills (I guess by the time I made the scene it had been decided that if a bomb was dropped, no amount of ducking and covering would save us). So I was saved that fear. And I am too old to have gone through school after the school shootings - so I have never been through that kind of a drill. Again, knowing the kind of little kid I was, I would have gone around afraid much of the time after that, expecting it to happen eventually.

I don't know. I don't have any answers. If I did, I'd run for Congress or something. (In a strange way, it's almost a relief to be able to admit that I don't have any answers to this - that I don't have to contemplate how I'd fix things. It's not my responsibility).

I don't know what causes someone to take it into their head to kill innocent people. It seems like we're seeing more and more of this; I don't know if it's reported more widely (surely in the 1800s, there were occasionally cases of people who went nuts and did bad stuff?) or if more people are able to depersonalize others in that way, see them as targets.

As I said, I don't know. Sometimes other people irritate me; I hate having to stand in line at the post office with someone who has an unruly child. But I'd never even think of SAYING something rude to that parent, let alone harming them or their child. If I inadvertently say something that hurts someone's feelings, I feel bad for hours - sometimes days - afterward. So I really don't get the psychology (If it's that) behind wanting to "take out" a bunch of other people.

Someone commented that "There's a certain percentage of the population that believes the world is going to end on the 21st; watch out for crazies doing crazy things." I hope with all my heart that they are wrong about that. (No, the world is NOT going to end on the 21st; from all the "serious" stuff I've read about the Maya calender, it essentially means that that's the point where they, to oversimplify things, ran out of paper to write the calender on).

I don't know. I admit, selfishly, all I care about at this point is getting safely back up to my parents' house to see them for Christmas.