Jaci Dawn

Empathy: Write about your feelings of empathy or compassion for another person.

I check the news in the morning to make certain we are still here, on this planet, breathing air. Anything could happen in the night: North Korea could bomb us, war could be declared, martial law, an earthquake could drop the entire West Coast into the ocean.This morning’s news confirmed we are not all here.

A psychopath stood on the 32nd floor of a ritzy Las Vegas hotel and fired full automatic weapons into a crowd of 22,000 attending a country music festival in the arena down below him. He didn’t have to be a good shot: he’d converted at least one weapon to fully automatic. The last count of the dead was up to 59. Over 520 people injured.

I have tried all day to steer away from the false reports, the angry reports, and the graphic photos. My heart has hurt. I feel the pain of every mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, grandparent, friend searching for that one person. I die a little inside with each news flash.

We have an epidemic of madness in this world. If not a firearm, then a semi-truck. Or a suicide bomber.  Sarin gas on a commuter train. Hordes of Mongols on their sure-footed horses bearing down on unprotected villages, burning, killing, raping, and leaving no survivors. Machete-wielding tribes burning down churches and schools, following the blue print of the Mongols. Children targeted.

We want to explain it through politics and psycho-babble, control, and blame. We try to downplay the act with the words, “Not a terrorist act” – yet, it was surely a terrorist act. A lone terrorist with an arsenal of weapons, some converted illegally into fully automatic weapons, and a truly diabolical plan to inflict the most damage as possible before taking his own life.

I have no answers. I cannot peer into the mind of a being that would inflict such pain, horror, and death on another person – or group of people. I don’t understand how it happens in Israel or the Ukraine or Myanmar, North Vietnam, North Korea, France, Spain, Norway, or Ireland. I don’t know how it happens in Sandy Hook or Columbine High School or Clackamas Town Center.

Every time it happens, wherever it happens, I mourn with the survivors and the families, I sense the fear and terror of the victims. I can’t read certain history passages because of the violence, terror, and destruction. I am haunted by James Michener’s Afghanistan, where he describes a column made of human skulls, built by one of the Khans. Skulls of the conquered.

We’re a mad race, we human beings.

Tonight, I mourn in empathy with those who mourn.