Colorado has just experienced one of those unthinkable tragedies.  The kind that completely paralyze people in the short-term, and alter their very lifestyles in the long-term.  On Friday, just after midnight, a heavily armored and armed man entered a theater full of people watching a new movie that had just been released, and began shooting.

12 people, including a six year old child, were killed.  58 more were wounded.  Almost three days later, 26 of those people remain in the hospital with 9 of them in critical or grave condition.

I am old enough that I have lived through many of these unthinkable tragedies.  The assassination of President Kennedy.  The murders of Olympic athletes at the 1972 games.  The shuttle Challenger disaster. The Columbine School shootings.  September 11th.  The Oklahoma Federal Building bombing.  David Koresh and the Waco fire.

And no matter how many times you live through one of these events, you are stunned by the audacity of the attack and the attacker(s), stunned by the loss of life, and derailed by the loss of a feeling of safety.

I don’t do midnight movies, and I don’t do premiers.  I’ve often lived by the adage that nothing good ever happens after midnight.  The likelihood that I would have been in such a place at such a time is pretty small.  But the reality is, every one of these types of tragedies that happens is a place where normal, everyday people might be.  People like me, like my kids.  There is no truly “safe” place for anyone, even in a country where we have presumably some of the most broadly allowed freedoms in the entire world.

And yet, Friday morning, I was on my way to my usual morning walk, having just heard the news of the shootings, the sun was still coming up over the horizon, the birds were singing, the geese were swimming.  People were going to work, the clerks in the grocery stores were ringing up purchases, planes were taking off and landing from my local airport, and there were six hot air balloons in the air over my county, as there are every single morning.  The world continues to turn, the days continue to pass, the sun rises and sets, and life goes on.

When things like this happen, you wonder, if only for a few brief minutes, how the world can go on.  How life can continue.  But it does.  We move on.  We don’t know any other way.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 at 3:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.