Colorado

Like many, I am all-together horrified by the recent shooting in Colorado, and devastated for all the families of the victims. Events like this make me question whether there is any logic in the human experience. Why on earth would people, innocent people, who are just sitting and watching a movie, have to be subjected to the most horrific of acts and many of them (including an innocent 6-year-old girl *tear*), lose their lives when they were doing absolutely nothing wrong. It makes no sense. It’s scary, it’s awful and it makes me seriously question the mental state of the world.

At the same time, I’m shocked by the people online who are instantly damning the accused shooter to the fiery pits of hell. I really feel like the good that can come out of a tragedy like this, is that it provokes us to look at the bigger picture of things, to put things into perspective, to understand each other better. That includes James Holmes. When I watched this young man in court yesterday, I was struck down by an additional wave of sadness. What happened to turn this ambitious kid, promising young med student, into a mass killer? I think we can all agree that something went wrong here. There has to be mental illness, because what he did is not at all a sane thing to do, not something that a balanced person would even think about trying to get away with. Something has changed in him, and it’s not my place to speculate on what that was.

But I can’t help but to be saddened by the thought of a kid, slipping into mental illness without anyone noticing or caring. I’m overcome with emotion by the idea of a mother being woken up in the night to be told that her son (that baby she once cradled, the boy she nurtured) has committed a sickening act and is now despised and damned by an entire country. To me, these tragic stories should be added to the list of tragic stories coming out of this. In my view, there is always  more going on in any given situation than we realize. We all have our stories that lista of circumstances that have gone into making us who we are.

It’s easy to say, “Give him the death penalty and we’ll all feel better about this.” That’s the easy way to think, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about the senseless tragedy that has occurred. Maybe I’m weird, but all I keep thinking is that as crazy as it seems, and despite all the evil acts that exist in the world, the fact remains that we are all one. All of us are from the same place whether we like it or not. And it’s only when we realize that fully, when we let go of our pre-conditioned ways of reacting to things, that any changes will come to our human consciousness.