August 4, 2019
I typed this Facebook post quickly, without any time spent thinking about it or editing it, less than two hours after I first woke up to the news and the frantic text messages and calls. Despite it being my immediate, visceral gut reaction, I still stand by it.
This time, it happened in my community.
But I don’t feel any different.
It happened four blocks from my house, three blocks from where I work, and 20 yards from where friends and I were having drinks a few hours earlier.
But I don’t feel any different.
It happened in an area I’ve been to a thousand times, where I’ve made hundreds of friends and spent countless hours and made a million memories.
But I don’t feel any different.
As it was happening, I was driving home from a friend’s house, traveling down a parallel street two blocks away. I saw five or six ambulances and emergency vehicles speeding to the scene, and had to get out of the way of one that was barreling toward me, going the wrong way down a one-way street to get to the scene as quickly as possible.
But I don’t feel any different.
I spent the first two hours of my day responding to text messages from dozens of friends near and far, asking if I was okay and expressing their relief when they heard back from me. My father almost never calls me and rarely shows emotion, but he called this morning, trying not to show the obvious panic in his voice, just wanting to make sure I was alive and unhurt.
But I don’t feel any different.
I’ve been in contact with many of my friends and know they’re safe. But I sit here not yet knowing the names of any of the victims, fully aware that once I learn them, there will be names I recognize. People I have met or have seen or, likely, have known personally will be dead or injured.
But I don’t feel any different.
Despite all of these personal connections to this tragedy, I feel the same. I see dozens of comments from friends indicating that it’s different this time because it hit *us*. And I completely understand that reaction and by no means am disparaging that feeling, but to me it’s no different. I hear people saying they can’t believe it happened here.
I can.
At an average pace of more than one mass shooting per day in this country, how can I be shocked when it’s in my back yard?
I see people saying that now it has become personal. And, yes, of course it’s personal. It happened in my town, near my house, to my friends, in a place I know well, as I drove by two streets away. It’s personal. But it’s no more personal now than it has been every other time in every other place.
Minutes from now, I’ll be standing at a vigil in my home town, for my home town, with people who *are* home to me. But I don’t feel any more or less personally affected than I was in October when I was standing at a vigil for the shooting at the Pittsburgh synagogue. Or in March when I was standing at a vigil for the shooting at the New Zealand mosque. Or last year when I was standing on Pennsylvania Avenue with the Parkland kids.
If any of this sounds to you like I don’t care, you’re mistaken. I’m angry. Too angry for words. I’m sad. Too sad to process. Worst of all, I’m just numb. I saw a dead dog on the side of the road today and got choked up, but I haven’t been able to feel much of anything about what happened here last night.
All I’ve really been able to do is to stare at a photo on my wall that I took in DC last year of someone holding a sign that read “This is not normal,” trying to remind myself of that and, at the same time, trying to still believe that.
It’s pathetic. I’d like to say we’re better than this, but I’m not entirely sure we are.
All I do know is that I feel the same today as I do every time this happens, despite how close to home it happened this time.
This time, it happened in my community.
But all the other times, it did, too.