I very rarely post about anything political, here or anywhere else on social media. I very rarely even engage in discussions in person about such things. I have generally found that if someone disagrees with you, it’s rare to never that is going to change, so you’re just playing with pigs and pigeons. And the conversations between people who agree often seem most concerned with “the show” of people agreeing with them, a daisy-chain of self-congratulations and pretention.

I don’t have time for that nonsense; moreover I feel like I have little to add to the conversation. There is nothing in this world that my post or my tweet is going to add to the collective prattle of people who will have forgotten all about whatever the issue is within days, maybe a week if we’re lucky. My silence is not turning a blind eye or a deaf ear or burying my head in the sand; it’s simply a refusal to add to the meaningless noise. So I tend to only speak about these things when I have something personal to say about what is going on. When Trump was elected and I saw the danger his presidency represents to my queer husband and my black son, I talked about my feelings. When the travel ban threatened the lives and families of hundreds of people and their families who I know and love, I talked about my feelings.

These days when we can’t seem to go a week without another senseless shooting, having our loved ones harmed or killed by some psychotic asshole is one of our greatest fears. Every time there is a mass shooting, particularly a school shooting, I’m just as guilty as the next person of being terrified to let my loved ones out of my sight for a while, terrified they will be the next victims. But then life intrudes and marches on, and in the fray of work deadlines and karate practice and getting the tires changed and fixing the toilet – our fears fade. Because even as out of control and scary as the problem has become, the likelihood of it happening to OUR loved ones is still so small that our fear is an abstraction; a “what if” that is easily swept away by our day to day concerns.

That was me today; upset by another senseless loss of life, worried about the “what if next time?”…but already being distracted by other mundane concerns.

One phone call shattered that in seconds.

I listened in disbelief and shock and deepening devastation as I was told by my boss that a mutual professional associate of ours, and someone who has not just been my colleague but also a friend for more than 5 years, was grieving for the loss of his daughter who was killed in the school shooting in Florida yesterday.

It changes everything.

The abstraction is stripped away and it is no longer a “what if”, it is an “oh my god how can this be really happening?” There is no hiding, there is no more luxury of allowing yourself to be distracted by bullshit. It is no longer something you mourn indirectly from afar; the pain is now your own.

I’m absolutely not saying that I wish this upon anyone else  – no matter how much we disagree with them or how reprehensible we find their positions or words or actions – no one should ever have to go through this. But I do feel that if those people with the actual power to change things, who choose not to, could be on this side of the line, things would change. If this horrible pain was their own rather than just something they could “pray over” and move on –  maybe something would finally be done and maybe no more lives would end for no reason. Maybe we would stop arguing about “rights” and “fairness,” and decades-old documents that cannot be literally interpreted, and bigger issues such as mental healthcare which absolutely contributes and needs to be addressed but CANNOT be fixed fast enough to save the people that are dying RIGHT NOW… and a million other bullshit things and DO SOMETHING.

Maybe Alyssa would still be here.

In Memory of Alyssa Alhadeff