post from the end of the world

So the world didn't end today.  Or maybe it ended one week earlier, in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.  On a day when someone went on a killing at an elementary school, ending the lives of twenty children and six adults, it would not be too much to say the world did end, apocalypse has arrived.  At least momentarily it did.

I know this stuff happens.  It happens all over the world, every day.  The lives of the white, well-off children of Sandy Hook are no more valuable or precious than the lives of the children who suffer everyday in the rest of the world.  But that doesn't make the losses last Friday any less significant either.  In fact, it only goes to remind us that we don't pay enough attention, we take too much for granted.  The suffering that goes on every second of every day should stir something in us.  Make us want to be better.  Better is where it's at.  Better is where it's got to go.  All the grieving, all the sorrow would be for naught if it doesn't make us better.  Champions they say.  Heroes.  Where there is an apocalypse, there's got to be champions and heroes.  That's what evil makes.

I think about this stuff a lot, about being a champion, first in your own live and then in the world at large.  I am the last person you may ever associate with any sort of heroism.  I don't do things.  But I really do think about this stuff a lot.  I think of the world as good vs. evil and then all the gooey center in between.  I know I am not evil - that much I know for certain.  But what I want to avoid is the gooey center too.  I want to stand firmly on this side of the line.

The children who died.  And the children who die everyday.  I think about people this way.  We are all just stars in this big boundless universe, tumbling through the vastness with a million other stars.  Sometimes people come into your lives and you stay on the same path for a while.  A few a lifetime.  And then sometimes people disappear as fast as they show up.  It doesn't make their impact any less.  These collisions, however short-lived, can change your course forever.  These children didn't stay forever, but whatever time it was, it meant something.

I don't know how people forget.  I don't forget feelings.  I may forget names and faces and what I had for lunch last week, but I cannot forget the feelings that are left by people with whom I've collided.  Sometimes I question how it is that people whom I only knew for a few years can change me so much, but then those stars were so bright in my eyes, their impact so hard, that there surely is no chance of recovery.  For better or worse they became part of my make-up.  They make me feel, they make me ache (too much for my liking), but if I do this right, they make me stronger.

That's what these children are.

Anyways, since the world didn't end and we are to continue doing this, then let's do this right.  This is another chance.