Pray for...

I had to drive the company truck back to the shop to drop off of some pallets. It's a bit of a drive, so I flipped on the radio. While most of my coworkers listen to one of the swath of country stations that cluster Idaho's airwaves, the old man within me flips it to National Public Radio. I heard a reporter shouting over screaming herds of people. He was in Barcelona. A man drove a truck through a crowd on the busiest street at the busiest time of the day. over a dozen dead, even more injured. It was jarring; scary, really. The rest of the world stopped as I drove down a country lane in Idaho, almost as if the next hill over I'd be in Spain. Forget about pallets and orders, this was it. For today, at least.

A few weeks later I took a truck off site and almost the exact same thing happened. I switched the station and heard a massive explosion in Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. Hundreds of people dead. Clips playing of Somali refugees living in the US were sharing stories about family members that died in the attack. Doctors in the city described looking at the carnage with horror.

These two cities joined a sad slew of other towns that have their name on a map for the wrong reasons. What do you know about Aurora, Colorado? How about Columbine? Or Newtown? Even New York and Las Vegas have been scarred. This year there it seems like there is no time to breathe or
to dwell.

It reminded me of a song by Mark Kozelek. In the song "Pray for Newtown" he uses his intensely intimate writing style to describe what it feels like to go through these experiences, this time on a more personal level.

"I was a Junior in High School when I turned the TV on
James Huberty went to a restaurant, shot everyone up with a machine gun
It was from my hometown
We talked about it til the sun went down
Then everybody got up and stretched and yawned and then our lives went on"

"I just left Safeway, when I walked through my doorway

When a guy took a boat to an island and shot up a bunch a little kids in Norway

Called a few friends, but no one much really cared
But I did, because I got a lot of friends there"

I had a friend serving her mission in Paris the same time as the bombings. She sent out an email saying she was fine. I would occasionally tell people around me of the coincidence. They would be jarred for a second, then courteously sympathize when they learned she was okay. But, there was no reason to feel bad for me if she was okay. It was a strange moment.

Three weeks ago, while flipping on the TV to check in on my favorite team's game, and just like the radio, a reporter is in between me and the game, telling me there was a church shooting in a small town near San Antonio.
Blood began to rush a little faster. I finally felt the same as Mark. "I lived in San Antonio suburbs. I actually know people who that could be." The next ten minutes I battled a sling of emotions as I searched for more information. "Thank goodness, it wasn't a Mormon church." "How could you say that?" "It's also a town I never heard of." "It's still a shooting, there's still something wrong with it." "That's only 10 miles away from where I lived, how are my friends?" "They're probably still in church, how could they have ever been there?" The thoughts blasted on, but this was something that I really cared about., this was something that could have had detrimental impact on me. I felt like Mark, rushing for comfort, but I didn't really need it.
None of my Texan friends said anything about the shooting. My mission friends still in Texas said nothing of it the next day. The story kept unfolding to uncomfortable degrees; politics was tossed into it; opinions began to be made, and the last coals of this heart-breaker are almost out, to sit alongside Newtown, Aurora, and Columbine in the dark halls of history.

What can we do though? To get flustered over these moments simply isn't worth it. We can't prevent what already happened; we can't quite console those who went through it, but there's an overhanging guilt that presses on our empathy.

Mark goes on:

So when Christmas comes and you're out running around

take a moment and pause to think about the ones who died in Newtown

They went so young, who gave their lives

To make us stop and think and try to get it right...

When you're gonna get married and out shopping around

Take a moment to think about the families that lost so much in Newtown

Like the other attacks, Sutherland Springs is another dark spot in life that we must walk away from. For Mark, it's enough to think. Just take a moment out of life to sympathize and especially apply. It's perhaps the only we can do in these circumstances. Ugly things are not fun to look at, however there's still something to learn from them.