what is to be done?

[threeplusfire]

My eyes still hurt. It's been that kind of day. God, it was so beautiful on campus, and that just made me angry at myself for being so sad. I just wanted to curl up in the bluebonnets, or under the mountain laurels in the sunlight. They smelled so nice.

Another shooting, more dead high school kids. More deaths because people won't take responsibility for their actions. It makes me sick, and reminds me of the terrible things that I witnessed in my own high school. A fairly wealthy, largely white suburban school in a decent school district. As good as it gets in Texas.

I remember watching Columbine on the television in the break room at the Daily Texan, how I doubled over gasping as that boy went out the library window. Some creepy empathetic pain. I came down with a raging kidney infection that night. I remember watching Gary beat Steven to a bloody pulp in the hallway over Christine, how he picked Steven up and slammed him against the lockers. Over and over again. I remember the police in the hallways, talking to a crying girl, watching over us all with guns at their side after those redneck boys beat one of their own to death in his driveway. They left him for his parents to find later that evening. Again, a fight over a girl. I remember the teacher who abused us, the man who tried to rip us apart in the most vile inhuman way possible. How no one believed us begging for help.

There is so much going on and I don't know how to explain any of it. How am I going to write all this down when I can hardly keep my eyes open and it hurts so damn bad inside. I watched an ambulance scream past me on the street, and I burst into tears.

I do not know what to do.

Comments

[raindog.livejournal.com]

I heard about the Oklahoma City bombings several days after they happened. I lived 40 miles from town in Montana, we had no t.v. A friend told me about it when she called, and later that day I heard more on the radio as I drove to town. As I drove I wept, uncontrollably, with grief for the babies that had died. And I had the sensation that the spirits of those children and their mothers filled the car. The grief was unbearably palpable.

I have no words of comfort for you. I think if we do not rage against such sorrow, if we do not experience a great, intense collective grief when these brutal tragedies happen, then we become complicit, individually, in them.

strange memories

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Maybe what makes me feel so strange about all of it is that I seem to be at a school every time I hear something like this. When they finally invaded Waco, all the tvs in the school were silently tuned to the footage. In the background of every class was fire and destruction and death. It stands out as one of the most vivid disturbing television memories I have.

I wish I knew what to do with my anger.