By David Fortier
Come Sunday morning, Mary and I will have gotten through our bout with COVID-19. On Saturday evening we both took rapid tests and tested negative, which is good, of course, and which is interesting because we both returned to work earlier in the week and were instructed not to take tests after being home for five days. The key was our symptoms. If symptoms were gone, we were good. And we are, and we tested only because we wanted to assuage our own curiosity.
Getting over COVID-19 was one way to distract myself from yet another school shooting, this time in a small town in Texas. Everyone knows the name of the town, everyone has been over the events over and over, everyone is aware of the numbers and timelines—and in the end, the reality is that more people, this time children and their teachers (not a first) are dead, and families are grieving. I have tried to stay in that space, taking in, once again, the terrible news.
And remember that as terrible as this is, just 10 days earlier there was another mass shooting in Buffalo—why are we so polite about these things, why not just call it what it is, a mass killing? And between that killing in Buffalo and the one in Uvalde, there was other killing by guns in Indiana, Washington State, Florida, California, Louisiana, Illinois, Pennsylvania, among others.
I had to wonder, if every time the country learned of one of these killings, we simply stopped everything and let the reality sink in, over and over and over, without returning to our “routines,” and accepting these tragedies as a new normal, whether we might, in our commiseration, come to our senses and find ourselves compelled to do something to address this killing cycle.
Stop, just stop, and absorb, and see where that takes us. Perhaps the enormity of the situation might wedge its way into our collective intelligence and create an opening for action. In any event, stopping things, including shutting down workplaces, any type of business exchange, turning off screens, stopping all of it and leaving us with few or no distractions, just might drive us to face the reality and see where we end up.
And of course, confronting this reality we might, for the first time, begin to understand the gravity of the situation, together. No, I am not recommending any solutions, just putting this out there. The implication is that a solution resides among us and not beyond us—as apparently, some others of us would like to believe.
“Come Sunday morning” is intended to be a weekly review, a recounting of the past week and an anticipation of week to come. Among its features will be reviews of old and new books, sharing of favorite podcasts, some family news, Bristol events and happenings and issues surrounding education, work and community journalism. He can be reached at dfortier@bristoledition.org
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