I’ll admit that there are some days when I feel like stuff is pretty bad. As with most people, I imagine, it can be easy to focus on how stressed out I am over finances, health issues, car trouble, marital concerns, whatever it is that is going on with my kid, deadlines on projects I don’t really want to be doing, deadlines on projects I really don’t want to be doing, some bullshit, that other thing, whatever… But before I go moping off into my self-aggrandized pit of misery, something usually stops me. More and more often in recent years, it has been essentially the same thing: the reminder, through everyday tragedies experienced by people I care about, that life is fragile, tenuous and entirely worth not wasting on feeling sorry for myself.
Tragedy teaches us
As much as these are lessons I would rather not have learned, it is an inescapable fact that every tragic occurrence teaches something. The lesson might seem small, even devastatingly pointless, but that is part of the theme; the overarching message life gives us is that we are all relatively inconsequential, except to each other. Our value is created by our contribution, our loss felt more deeply for a future deprived.
More than that, however, life teaches us that we — any one of us, at any time — can simply be removed from the social equation. That includes everyone we love, everything we hold dear. Our closest friends. Our parents. Our children.
There are lots of practical causes for things that turn tragic. Some of these we can do something about. Better gun regulations, better mental health services, better education. Sometimes we just get lucky and hit the brakes while turning the wheel at precisely the right moment.
Tragedy is unavoidable
The older I get, the more I realize how different the world is from what I perceived as a child. In elementary school, tragedy always seemed to be some sort of outlier. It happened, I knew; I’d read about tragic events from the past (even the recent past, though to a child anything that happened before you were born is ancient history), I watched television, I overheard conversations between the adults around me. And I’ll never forget watching the news after an airliner exploded right after takeoff from O’Hare International Airport, unable to peel my eyes from the scrolling list of confirmed passengers until I had seen the names of my friend’s parents. There were no survivors and the only other time I saw my friend after that was at the church service where many members of our town went to collectively mourn. My friend and his sister went away with relatives, my experience with orphans dipped back to the colorful dazzle of “Annie” and her relentless insistence that the sun will, in fact, return tomorrow. Somewhere in the back of my brain, though, the loss of my friend’s parents (and his subsequent departure) always bothered me. I felt powerless to help him, even powerless to explain to myself what had happened or why.
Years passed without anything hitting too close to home. The blinders of youth or the good fortune of privileged circumstance, for whatever reason, permitted me to enjoy the secure feeling of believing that the world was a safe, mostly pleasant place. I knew goodness, even though I saw those experiencing misfortune (usually at some distance). When I was in middle school, I strolled with a young friend down some streets and alleys in Chicago between Grant Park and the Sears Tower, stepping over the legs of homeless people and avoiding a plethora of litter, before returning to our parents and enjoying some ribs at a huge BBQ cook-off. I never felt for a moment that our brief step off the approved grid was dangerous, though I finally appreciate my mother’s registered alarm at the time when we told her where we had been. Still, this incident had only opened a brief window that closed almost as quickly as our ride back to my rural home.
While I was not numb to the plight of others, nor was I overly distraught by it; tragedy of the sort I witnessed seemed mostly to be brought upon the self and was to be treated with compassion, perhaps, but not fear. My father was a good example, reminding me that those down on their luck should always be treated with honor and respect, given the benefit of the doubt that their misfortune was not the basis on which they should be judged. He was a card-carrying fiscal conservative, had run for Illinois State Senate on the Republican ticket as a young attorney, but I never saw him lack compassion when a person of lesser means asked for assistance. When he would hand a buck or two to a panhandler, he’d take that moment to speak to the person as a human being and I could always tell that the exchange touched him in some way.
My dad was not, however, the kind of man who talked much about his feelings. Or his past. I knew he had had a difficult upbringing. He was a child of German immigrants during WWII, when nationalistic feelings ran high and discrimination was rampant. (While there is no comparison to those of Japanese decent, because Germans were not being sent off to internment camps on account of their closer resemblance to other Europeans, I did find out that my father had been failed by a teacher simply because his parents were immigrants and therefore probably sympathized with the enemy — in spite of having emigrated to the US in order to avoid the Nazi threat — and also that he had been beaten by other students with enough frequency to turn him to boxing.) But he generally claimed he simply did not remember much of his childhood and left it at that. Meanwhile, I was off in the woods climbing trees or wandering along paths with their relatively benign secrets ready for my discovery.
Tragedy changes perception
Not until approaching legal adulthood did it dawn on me that there was an ugly underside to my small hometown existence. I had certainly been aware that there was, as it was often disparagingly referred to, an “element” in town that was better not mixed with. In truth, however, this euphemistically referred to a group of people who were considered “low-class” if not strictly lower class; while many of them may have been comparatively poor, it was the implication that they were more prone to petty crime or generally being a bad influence in terms of their behavior. Maybe it was too much drinking and swearing, maybe too much barroom brawling, maybe it was just being out playing pool all night — sometimes it was a knife fight, every now and again there were whispers of domestic abuse. But these were not the people “we” associated with. The odd murder happened among “that element” and I was not aware of it crossing the societal line.
In high school, of course, it became more apparent that there was a lot more going on in the world — in my world, as it were — than I had realized. Forced examination required me to face the fact that not everyone labeled as being part of that bad societal element was, objectively, a bad person, and quite probably the demographic distinction was entirely based on false assumptions. I became friends with kids from the wrong side of the tracks simply because those tracks did not exist. And while I had always been somewhat compassionate, that trait took on new meaning when I understood how the effects of suicide, abandonment or addiction had molded friends I was only really beginning to know. Then something happened that changed my worldview dramatically.
Over a period of years following high school and through college, I began learning information from a lot of girls I had known, mostly from those I had dated and remained friends with. While most of them had enjoyed a similarly idyllic youth, a statistically significant number of them shared one experience that I found particularly unsettling — in spite of the often matter-of-fact way in which they related the information to me. I was not keeping records of these conversations, but I was unconsciously cataloging data. At one point in the early 90s, the realization hit me hard: easily, a solid 20% of the girls I had dated had been sexually assaulted in some way. This group includes everyone I never got past the handholding stage with up through serious relationships, drunken entanglements and party hookups. At the time I discovered this, I found some research suggesting that my demographic sample actually offered a lower percentage than the national average, but not by much — and I suspected that if I was able to find out statistics on everyone I knew, or everyone in my home town, certainly the percentage would rise.
It broke my heart. And as I have grown older, I have discovered that more and more of the women I know experienced some kind of sexual abuse in their life (mostly as young girls). The information angers me. It makes me distrustful. And it makes me painfully aware of the cruel nature lurking in so many people. Perhaps the actual number of offenders is comparatively small — I realize that the abuse may have happened only one time over a lifetime for most of these women, or at least from only one person in most cases, so it is important to remember that the vast majority of people have not committed abuse like this. Even so, the fact that enough of this abuse has occurred, from enough of these people, shows that there is a significant and powerful tragedy happening to people we love right under our noses and most often hidden from sight.
Then a friend is killed by a drunk driver or that one who fell asleep at the wheel. As adults, it is almost impossible not to have been effected by this at least once. Sudden, unexpected, devastatingly irreversible — and completely impossible to comprehend. Car accidents are a leading cause of death and yet we are always taken by surprise, shaken by the loss. These tragedies quite literally happen all the time, or at least every day though car accidents are occurring by the minute, around the clock. Strangely, however, we accept these as part of life, at least in the broad societal context, because we are a car-based culture. We drive to get where we are going (in Los Angeles, we drive just to go down a few blocks). We do not believe that getting into a car is going to kill us, but we understand that the risk is there even when we refuse to believe it will apply to ourselves.
Tragedy affects everyone
The newer risk taking shape in the public consciousness is not really new at all. With a frequency threatening to unseat the automobile as Kingmaker of Tragedy, guns are taking lives or maiming innocents and thanks to our ever-more-connected society, we are more aware than ever about not just how serious a problem this is, but how close we are to the victims and their families. The majority of the victims of gun violence were shot by people they knew. This is not news anymore — the statement has been presented by authorities for decades. But it takes on different meaning when you know someone whose associate or friend or cousin or nephew was killed by a co-worker or lover or sibling or parent. It takes on different meaning when you know someone whose son or daughter was shot by a friend or neighbor or, God forbid, a member of the family. It takes on different meaning when you know the life that was taken, and sadly this is something that is now almost impossible to ignore because by now we all share this experience or we are about to.
This is not the weird twist of fate where a husband steps backward off a cliff edge during a photo-op. This is not the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a vehicle veers out of control and smashes through the side of a fast food restaurant. These things happen (the last example happened at one of my client’s establishments, killing a number of people out for breakfast with their families). But those are outliers, bizarre and unusual occurrences that make the foundations of urban legends, even as they devastate those close to the victims. Guns and our easy access to them are something else, entirely.
It would be one thing to blame most gun deaths on terrorists or at least hardened criminals. The facts show that most often the killings are impulsive and passionate, spurned not by a premeditated determination to commit a crime, but by desperation in the moment. Some of these are suicides, too many are murders. Almost all of them are committed using a household gun that was legally obtained. The truly frightening fact is that almost all gun attacks, including “mass shootings” (the definition of which changes depending on who is collecting statistics) of both the disgruntled worker and domestic terrorist varieties, are committed with legally purchased weapons, and almost always by the gun’s registered owner. And the sad fact is that relatively few deaths result from bona fide terrorist action, much less the result of planned criminal activity. Suicides, accidents and crimes of passion dominate the causes of gun-related deaths. Every day, tragedy.
Yet life continues. We wake, face a new sunrise, try to rise ourselves as brightly as we can. We move along from tragedy. Help from family, friends, community; this encourages us forth when we are fortunate enough to have it. When we do not have help, hopefully we find the strength within ourselves to push forth and keep our spirits high and strong. Because life is valuable. Life is meaningful. And it is what we choose to make of it, what we choose as our legacy.
So I am thankful every single day, no matter how sick and shitty I may feel, because it is one more day in which I can cherish those who are close to me and one more day in which I can offer something positive back to the world, keeping the scales tipped in favor of the goodness I see all around me. And it is one more day in which I can give a damn about the future and the world I am passing along to my daughter, and try to ensure that she gets a solid shot at wearing her youthful blinders as long as she can, believing that this world is safe and comforting and beautiful. Because that is how it should be, for all of us. And as long as we have these tragedies that surround us, inescapably, we should use them as reminders and as calls to action that we need to work together, bound as a greater community, to improve conditions and provide safeguards wherever possible. Mostly, however, we might consider taking from these tragedies one simple, singular message: love today and all that it contains, be that the people around you or the beauty of one perfect moment. And out of that love, let us draw action in whatever form it takes.
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