In shock…

Last night, I went to take a bath, and after working all day, I felt really good for a change. I came back from my bath hyped to talk about the chapter of Little Star I’d just read, and then I saw a tweet that started, “How can such evil be possible?” I clicked the link, and my stomach turned upside down at the headline. I felt sick instantly, thinking of all those dead kids, of the families with Christmas presents under the tree for children whose lives were snuffed.

I chose to do the only thing I could. I pulled away from Twitter, and I cried. We were supposed to go out to have dinner with a friends, and I went along. But I barely tuned in anything hubby and our friend talked about. So many kids who no longer have a future. Each of them had a story. Their stories should have stretched out to old age, until they were watching their grandkids going to school. But no, their journeys ended in what’s supposed to be a safe haven for children.

I came back home and sat down, and I turned Twitter back on. A few people were already standing on the dead children as a soap box for why we need more guns. I unfollowed those people, and then I closed Twitter and sat hugging myself. Then a few hours later, I signed in again. It’s like nothing happened. People chatting up their hobbies, hawking their wares, as if this wasn’t a tragedy worthy of shock lasting more than a fleeting moment. “Oh, my heart goes out to those families…and now that I’ve expressed a token amount of grief, why not buy my new erotic novel for Christmas?”

You might think I’d want to talk about guns, about whether we have too many or too few, or about gun control, or about mental illness. You might think I’d rant about how no one is paying attention to the warning signs before these mass shootings. But instead, I want to just ask, where the hell is our empathy? Why is it that even with a tragedy this huge, we’re incapable of stopping and feeling something longer than five minutes?

What’s wrong with us that even the deaths of so many children no longer reaches us? How can anyone see this on the news and turn around and be cheerful five minutes later? Why can we no longer grieve and feel a shared bond over something tragic? Are we all so hard up for cash that we can’t take a day off from the constant polishing of our personal images and our projects? Why are the chants of “me-me-me” more important than taking a collective “we grieve”?

I don’t have any answers, and I’m not making accusations. I feel so hurt and confused right now. I want to fly back to Texas to check up on my brother’s kids, even though my brother hates my guts and thinks I’m a freak. I want to visit my niece and play with her baby boy. I want to appreciate every young life around me, because it can be ended in a flash, simply because some adult wishes it.

I want the human race to rediscover humanity, and now watching people move on quickly from this with no sense of connection to the young victims, I worry that we’ve reached a point of no return. What’s happened to us that nothing touches our souls anymore?