This morning was a pretty typical Sunday morning for me. My alarm went off at 9 a.m., which I obviously ignored because it was a Sunday morning after all. It was another hour until I actually tried to wake up, but was still reluctant to leave my bed. I was still mostly asleep when the "New York Times" alerts on my phone went off, informing me of the worlds most recent tragedy: "Police officers reported shot in Baton Rouge" My stomach sank a little and I decided to put off reading more details until I could at least have my morning coffee.
I have lost count of the number of mornings I've had like this this summer. Too often I wake up to headlines where the only thing I can process is what and where. Shooting, Orlando. Bombing, Baghdad. Sniper, Dallas. After awhile you almost have to be numb to all the chaos going on in the world. I'm not even shocked or horrified when I see these things in the news. How can I be when horrifying tragedies are happening every day? All I feel now when I read about something like what happened this morning is a vague sadness and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness.
About a month ago, shortly after the Orlando shootings I was sitting with one of the girls that I nanny in their living room. She was playing on her iPad when she looked up and asked me about what happened in Orlando. "Someone got hurt didn't they?" I didn't know how to respond. At eight years old she is, in some ways, already aware of what a dangerous world we live in, but how do you explain to an eight year old about mass shootings? All I could say was yes, someone was hurt.
Why do we live in a world where this even has to be a conversation? As a child she only had the vaguest idea that something terrible had happened, but it was troubling to me to realize that kids are aware of these tragedies as well and that they're affecting them more than we may know.
Somedays it feels like the world is spinning out of control. When I read about the military coup in Turkey in Friday my roommate said exactly what I was thinking, which was that it's finally happening: World War III. Between the increased violence and racial tensions here in the US and the amount of violence and political turmoil in the rest of the world it's difficult not acknowledge the sense of impending doom that I think we're all feeling.
I've been incredibly lucky that I've experienced these recent events only through their headlines. I know that I have felt only the smallest fraction of the pain and sadness felt by those directly affected by these events. I don't know how it feels to have a love one taken away from you in a senseless act of violence, but I know it needs to stop. It breaks my heart that this is the world we live right now. The kind of world where I'm no longer shocked and horrified when shocking and horrifying things happen.
