Where Do The Children Play?

Yesterday morning around 8 am, not even 24 hours after a terrorist gleefully killed eight innocent people and injured many others, my teenage daughter reached her school near Cooper Union to see police swarming around a horrific crime scene right outside the main entrance. Minutes earlier, a fifty six year old woman, who worked at her school, had been shot dead by an ex-boyfriend who then blew his own brains out.

The school went into lockdown and the staff and counselors were very supportive, but the children are badly shaken, still processing what will probably remain a traumatic memory for a very long time. So close are we, and our kids, to the raw and unpredictable violence of our times it is impossible to prepare them to be careful and to deal with something of this magnitude, so terrifying and close.

"You read about this stuff in the news and then you walk to school the next day and it happens right in front of you", my daughter told me at night. "What are you supposed to do?". Words fail me. Beyond the rush of love and relief and assurances, I don't know what to say. I could not sleep all night. I kept thinking of the terrors around the corner we cannot anticipate; the cruelties, emotional and physical, someone out there is planning for us; the unseen evil we cannot protect our kids from...

I think of mothers and fathers who've seen their children blown up in war, and the loved ones of the eight people who died on the West Side Highway, and how they must have felt when they got the terrible news, and the children of the murdered woman and how they are handling this calamity.

I feel a deep and dark sadness about it all.

But perhaps there is a way- through tenderness and compassion and vigilance. Perhaps we must become mercenaries of love who can care outrageously and anticipate and dissolve hate. Perhaps we can train ourselves to detect the small mushroom of rancor in someone and heal it before it becomes toxic. Perhaps we can forgive more easily and amplify kindness. Perhaps we can campaign more aggressively for gun control and tolerance.

Perhaps there is still a possibility for our children to remain children while they can.