I was at the gym yesterday and inundated with television news coverage of the shooting in Colorado. To say that the coverage of the event took the wind out of my sails for the day demonstrates exactly how packaged language fails to express the gravitas of what happened in that movie theater, but because this post gives me the breadth to say as much as I want in as many words as I want, without Twitter-like limitations, let me elaborate:
I began the day worried about Dexter, who had two falling spells in twenty-four hours. The day before yesterday, for no reason, his legs crumpled underneath him and he fell over backwards and banged his head against the pavement. He looked like a marionette gone slack. Then, yesterday morning, he tipped over off his potty on to his side, again while in a still moment, so I was scared. Something was disturbingly wrong. We made a pediatrician appointment for the same day.
Add to this the anxiety and sadness that Dexter has begun to express as he tries to transition from baby to big boy, particularly as it relates to preschool, and I was already feeling blue. Then I learn about this shooting in Colorado, and I felt deflated. That's what I meant by "wind out of my sails." I had no loft. I was dragging like a balloon losing its helium. It felt like I was pushing against an environmental resistance, like walking into a strong wind, but without the obvious presence of wind. I felt boggy with emotion. That's the problem with cliches and platitudes; they often have a wealth of good intent and rich description behind them, but the easy words that come to us, if they are too easy, fail to express the complexity of our reactions to events, be they personal or universal.
As I was reading the news at the gym (IPod on, TV volume off, closed-captioning on), I was struck by the preponderance of platitudes and cliched expressions of remorse and solace that played on the screen. Furthermore, I saw more of them as I logged on to Facebook. Maybe they sound familiar to you:
Our thoughts and prayers...
Our hearts go out to the victims and families...
We'll hug our children a little closer...
And after being inundated with such expressions, it's hard to believe that I was tapping into real sincerity. Cliches become so because of their reiteration. However, in the world of social media, where brevity is expected, such expressions are stock, even if the Tweeter or status updater is dealing with a complex and confounding flood of emotions regarding recent events. Furthermore, finding the real, unique, personal words to describe that in a limited space would be hard for anyone, so we use words like "prayer, heart, children."
In some ways we're flattened and rendered dumb by such senselessness. We want to leave articulateness to issues regarding women in the workplace or political ideologies because they're debatable subjects that stir the intellect whereas a senseless shooting of random people turns us, rightly so, into weeping empathizers. If we could really just package the feelings and send them out into the world attached to the flighty words, like the living, breathing carrier pigeons attached to notes they carry, then we could make people understand how stricken we are by random acts of violence. However, we're often left with platitudes as we just try to choke out something.
Our thoughts and prayers: This means that you're wishing speedy recovery for the injured and you're hoping that the families who have lost someone dear to them somehow find a way through and out of the pain. It means that you're trying to figure out why as if some kind of answer will make it better, and you're trying to send those thoughts across the miles to let the victims and victims' families know that you have the same questions and that you're nearly as heartbroken as they are. It means that you're turning to your belief in God as a way of finding comfort and answers even if He doesn't provide them for you because it's often the community of belief and prayer that collectively heals wounds. Even as the shooter was completely divorced from any sense of divinity. It means you've put aside your own personal problems to consider how much worse someone else has it.
Our hearts go out to the victims and families: This is a more secular version of the above platitude, but it essentially means the same thing, although without the presence of prayer to a higher power. What it means though is that when we're lying in bed without the warm down comforter of divinity, trying to make sense of senseless violence, and we're absolutely reeling with emotion, our hearts, some heaviness in our chest, keeping us from sleeping, we're hoping to send out the collective spirit of human empathy. We recognize that we leave the mind out of this. And here is where that repetition does well to uplift: so many of us sending our hearts across the miles.
We'll hug our children a little closer: We mean we can't imagine what it's like to lose a child, and here are all of these families who have just lost theirs. How absolutely devastating. One minute you're doing something as pedestrian as watching a movie, the next thing you know, you're watching your child die. And in the moments of national peace, we're just a bunch of nuclear families protecting our own, occasionally bumping up against another. But the kinetics of such a national tragedy make us bump up against people we don't even know. We say, "we'll hug our children a little closer" because we hope that such attention will prevent such an event in the future. We also hug our children closer because we recognize that they can be taken from us when we least expect it.
So there you go: a little background.
As for us, the visit to the pediatrician offered no information. We were told to continue to watch Dexter for more spells. If anything came up, we were told to make another appointment at which point we would have to begin looking into something neurological or cardiac-related. Great. I'm hoping that these were odd, isolated events intended to make me hug my child a little closer. I know I would be devastated if anything happened to him.
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