Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Another Day After
My anger meter is broken.
Mute. Flat. Dead. Like a lot of people.
Ours is the world of the body count. Nine doesn’t impress like twelve does, students don’t impress like people at bible study. None impresses like the first thirteen at Columbine when boys in trench coats murdered and maimed their fellow students. Cars pulled over to the side of the road that day to listen to the news.
Then there were more and more, adults and babies, kids waiting in line, couples at the movies, teachers taking attendance, people praying.
And there was just so much blood that people got sick of looking at it.
It’s time to realize that we are living in a barbarous place. If we don’t harden ourselves to that, we will be crushed by the reality, unable to function, go to school, buy bread on the way home, ice skate at the rink downtown. The guns are everywhere. In coat pockets, strapped on ankles, stuffed in backpacks, lying on the seat of the car. This is what’s real now. The guns are everywhere.
The fear will be paralyzing if we don’t adjust to this. Anything can happen and no one is safe.
Like lightening striking. When it happens, it happens. There’s nothing we can do.
4 Comments on “Another Day After”
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments
 | Pat on Anger Management |
 | Vickie on Sugarcane Flower |
 | Sue on Sugarcane Flower |
 | beth on Sugarcane Flower |
 | Deb on Sugarcane Flower |
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
This is not new. In a book published in the 1970s, the British author rode a motorcycle around the world. At the end of the book he stated the most frightening part of the trip was from Mexico to San Diego. The book is “Jupiter’s Travels”.
I’ve said my piece on my own blog. I couldn’t live with that fear.
No words. Again.
People often ask how I can live in Mexico with the Cartels. The thing is though, that guns are hard to find in Mexico. Yes, the police have them and so do the Cartels, but they are usually aimed at each other, not at those of us not involved in the drug trade. Yes, there was a shooting on the street just last week–but again, it was a drug dealer. I feel safer here than in the states. There, I’ve said it again. There are murders, but they are not senseless murders that are the acting out of psychiatric problems added to by the violence in our media and the fact that Americans, children included, just have the luxury of so much time on their hands to plan and execute such atrocities. Many children in Mexico are already working at the age of 11, or studying hard because they know how hard their parents have worked to keep them in school. I would that violence did not exist in the world, but that is a pipe dream, and if it must exist, I’m glad the “bad ” guys are using each other as targets instead of me. Another excellent essay, Red. You never disappoint. http://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/10/02/merry-go-round/