‘Just another kind of weather’

Sadness abounds. Another school shooting. Ten more dead. We weep with the news. In 1997, Greg Brown wrote in his song, “Whatever It Was”: My generation takes what it can get Are you surprised that the kids are all upset? They’re looking at Nothing and Nothing turns away and yawns I was looking for what I loved … Whatever it was, it’s gone. Greg is now in his 70s, just so you know which generation he is talking about that “takes what it can get.” The kids, well, they are still the children who have had no childhood. They are the kids who anticipate explosive blood in school.

Paige Curry, a student at Santa Fe High School in Galveston County, Texas, said, “It’s been happening everywhere. I’ve always kind of felt like that it was going to happen here, too.” What a sad testament to our times, our society, our belief system, our values.

In his memoir, Fourth Uncle In The Mountain, Quang Van Nguyen wrote of life in Vietnam from his birth under French occupation, through the American war years as a youth and under communism as a young adult. A cascade of violence that affected his life daily until he bought his way out of Southeast Asia as a “boat person.” In his book he said that, as a child, he thought the bombing was “just another kind of weather.”

Just another kind of weather. Wow. Is that what is happening to our children? Yesterday it rained. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny. Today my school got shot up. At least we haven’t had any tornadoes or bombs yet this semester.

Will there ever be another day when we do not weep with the news?