Sometimes I Feel Like Our Grief is Not Sharp Enough

Coming home from an invigorating poetry reading, I scrolled through my phone. My local Facebook mom group was pretty distraught. A shooting, not so far from where we live. One of the victims was a 6-year-old boy. An apparent murder-suicide that took 4 people's lives, including that little boy, same age as my little boy.

But this isn't about me. My life is full of kindness and serendipity. I hug my children not because I fear their loss, but because I need their bodies enfolded in mine. I need the press of their urgent needs to lodge in my body, to activate each day of loving with loving.

But I wonder what it means to have this fortunate life in a world seemingly indifferent to suffering. Where the scope of our emotional and political senses is limited only to our personal perceptions and experiences. Where so many of us are far removed from the burdens of violence and poverty and overt sexism and racism.

I don't sleep well at night. It's not guilt or discomfort with the incongruities of life. Or maybe it is that. Plus rage. Rage for so many things. So many things I'm just discovering. All the small ways I've been conditioned to feel less empathy for suffering and to disconnect myself from the messiness of human life.

There are no easy solutions to the world's problems. No pat philosophy or theology that explains why some people suffer and others don't. There's no handy blueprint for bringing forth a just world that isn't also marred by misuse. For me, there's nothing that explains any of it--our existence and our equal capacities and appetites for good and evil.

My life is full of kindness and serendipity. I haven't experienced the level of racism and vitriol and violence and trauma that others have. I don't even really know too many people who face this. I live in a bubble of comfort. But this doesn't lead me to believe that racism, xenophobia, violence and poverty are illusory or not my problem. How comforting is a material comfort that rests on the exploitation and erasure of the less fortunate?

You know, we do not have to accept this. We do not have to accept a world that lets a man easily obtain a gun and kill his family in grievance. We do not have to accept that the wealthy need their obscene wealth. We do not have to accept that people are willing to take away other people's humanity for spite or fear or political expediency. I have grief for this world now, but I won't accept that it will be this way forever. My life is full of kindness and serendipity. I don't know why that is, but I'll use it to usher in a radically different world.

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