First of all, from the relative safety of my blog, I would like to take this opportunity to say a big “fuck you” to the Washington D.C.-area sniper, and his threats, simultaneously grim and asinine.
Wow, $ten million, fucking idiot. That alone shows me he’s a low-class moron with no idea of the value of a dollar nowadays. Doesn’t he watch movies? $10 million is nothing for a decent criminal mastermind nowadays. Fucking fuckhead.
Beyond that, though – and I admit here that I’m writing this from a relatively unthreatened place far from the greater Washington D.C. metropolitan area, and that if I did live in Washington D.C. that maybe I, too, would be walking zigzag or taking vacation or sending my kids to relatives or something – there is the fundamental reality that our kids were never safe before this sniper came on the scene, either.
No one is ever safe. People down the street from us had a son they loved so much and feared for so deeply that they watched him every second of every day; they accompanied him on his way to and from school. The drove him everywhere and never, ever, left him unsupervised. Never was a child more protected, this apple of their eye. On a school hike, he was struck by lightning and killed.
You don’t believe me kids die, go take a walk through the part of the cemetary with the little headstones next time you’re in the neighborhood. When I was a kid, the teacher paired me up with Cindy, a girl with thick glasses and a hole in her heart, because I was one of the few nice kids I guess. She went to the hospital regularly for heart surgery, in about fourth grade she never came back.
Every time I drop my kids off somewhere, I’m terrified it might be the last time I see them. I could drop dead, they could. Something else could happen. You just never know. You just never know anything with certainty. Nothing is safe. Nothing is ever safe. Is it safe? No, it’s not fucking safe.
A man I know of, they were leaving on a family vacation and he went in to wake up his 17-year-old daughter because they were late, and found she had died in her sleep.
I take so much for granted. I yell at my kids. Worse, I ignore them. What they say to me sometimes goes in one ear and out the other, or doesn’t even go in an ear. I say, “Yeah, yeah, sure, honey.” That is criminal. Life is such a stroke of luck. How many times we luck out in a single day we’ll never know, starting from the luck it took for us to be created evolved as a species, conceived as individuals, to the luck it takes us to make it to work or school and back home again. I remind myself of this, and try to listen to my children. I don’t always manage. And I realize, no one can lead a very effective life if they spend all their time going, “what a beautiful accident this world is, get a load of that rainbow. Let me gaze in your eyes, I saw God there last time.”
But you can’t *never* do it, either. Sometimes you have to say, fuck you, sniper. Fuck you, death.