again

Binghamton is a town in mid-state New York that you wouldn’t be familiar with if you hadn’t already been there. The rain is omnipresent, the cold is acerbic and time moves in a decades-long lag. Its strip malls and chain restaurants and dive bars are perhaps not that indistinguishable from any other mid-state haunt… its claims to fame to date have been more unpredictable: a great university, Rod Serling, a world-class opera company, spiedies. You’ll be forgiven for having driven through on your way to New York City, and not remembering much.

But I did think there was a chance it would linger on the front page of the papers, even if only below the fold, for at least five days after the largest mass killing in the U.S. since Virginia Tech. Thirteen people died on Friday; yesterday there was a story about a letter believed to be from the gunman in the New York section of the Times: page A20. Today: nothing at all.

So the reporter in me wants to know why that happens in the case of Binghamton, and not Virginia Tech. Sheer numbers? Location? Amount of scintillating evidence left behind by the shooter? Lack of controversy surrounding law enforcement response? The fact that most of the victims were immigrants? Or that Obama was in Turkey, or surprised the troops in Iraq? And why, always, does the murderer get more ink than his victims?

I heard from a dear old friend on Saturday that someone we knew was killed. The mother of a well-loved family of ten kids that grew up on the South side, like us…a veteran substitute teacher, wife to an ENT doc, apparently a grandmother of 17. Didn’t know that ‘til I went searching for news about her: Roberta King. A personality so distinctive, effusive, genuine and kind that after not having thought about her for a good fifteen years, I could see her face as soon as her name was mentioned – hear the halting, steady lilt of her voice. She is what’s made this entry so difficult to write. That such a golden person can be and is too often taken so quickly from this world is now viscerally painful. To tell other people about her, to think of her kids and what they must be suffering through… it’s a deep, tearful sadness that I wasn’t expecting somehow.

The stone I’ve been turning over in my mind is whether or not it should even matter that I knew her. Is it not the same tragedy that she was one of twelve people that shone brightly for their families, their communities, their countries? To take the full compassionate view, is it not the same tragedy that a man was so desperate and deluded and insane that he thought the way to happiness was murdering people he may not have even known? Or even that it’s so easy to get a gun that this story gets repeated over and over and over and over and over again. The disgusting, exhausting, inconceivable cycle that we cannot seem to break.

I’d like to blame my lack of ideas about breaking this cycle on the little time I have left to write this. But in truth, I’m just at a loss. I know in the cosmic web of our un-separateness, I am connected to this violence: we are all connected to, part of, responsible (?) for this violence. All forms of aggression vibrate at the same frequency; even what we turn only towards ourselves gets deposited in that mammoth swamp of destructive energy. I think my teachers would say to not give power to anger, not to run away: to send out love to everyone that’s died, everyone that will be affected by this for the rest of their lives. I imagine it’s most important to keep our hearts open at the very moments we’d rather shut down. It feels risky and vulnerable and I’m not sure I’m brave enough to do it. But it’s worth a shot. I am unambiguously positive about that.