Henry got up, dressed all in black
Went down to the station
And he never came back
They found his clothes, scattered somewhere down the track
And he won’t be down on wall street in the morning
[…]
You find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door…
In a New York Minute…everything can change
She was just 24 years old. That’s it. That’s barely enough time to have done anything, barely enough time to step into the world and go “okay, I’m here – what’s next?”. She’d just fallen in love, just moved into her first shared apartment. All she did was get up and go to work in the morning. She was covering a shopping mall for Freya’s sake! Who gets killed covering a shopping mall!?
At first I wasn’t sure if I should say anything about the death of Alison Parker. After all, I do not live in Virginia, I didn’t know her, I didn’t know her friends or her family, I have – perhaps – no right to be grieving. But it’s not Alison Parker I’m grieving for, not really. It’s the world. Truly, what have we become that this kind of thing has become commonplace, that this kind of violence is somehow…seen at all as some kind of a solution, some kind of a way to make a statement.
The newspaper put it very well – you expect this kind of thing when someone is covering a war zone, or even a political rally – you worry that they might get hurt, might somehow get themselves into the line of fire. But local coverage? This is not something that would even cross your mind, and why should it?
We tell our children to be careful with their lives, but how are we supposed to protect them against what the world has so swiftly become right under our noses?
Or was the world always like this? Always this dark and this sharp…and I just live in too much of a bubble to see it?
Because if that’s the case, I’m starting to wonder if perhaps that bubble may not be the safest place to remain…at least there are no guns there…