On July 14, the streets of Nice buzzed with people enjoying the Bastille Day fireworks show. Then a young French-Tunisian man got into a twenty-ton truck and crushed eighty-four of them to death.
On my walk home from work today, I heard reports that Turkey’s military may have just deposed the nation’s government.
A few minutes ago, I read that two men in California chased a Pokemon right off a cliff. Another player was stabbed by a gang of strangers. Several more were robbed in darkened parking lots.
Orlando. Baghdad. Baton Rouge. Trump. Dallas. Brexit. Nice. Ten thousand daily cruelties. When did the placid, rosy world of my childhood peel off its face like a cartoon villain’s mask to reveal this mangled, bleeding wreck beneath? Why, after millennia of practice, does our species still get things so wrong? Why must we continually reach for animosity and fear before even considering the alternatives?
I wish I had some deep, comforting message to convey. Or that a few vaguely scriptural platitudes could soak up the blood or dim the pain. But the world hangs too heavy on my heart today for eloquent prose and meaningful insights. So, instead, I’ll give you these words from author Jen Hatmaker, posted on her Facebook page in the aftermath of Nice:
“I promise to examine the darkest, most discriminatory parts of my heart, the ones tucked away from public scrutiny and in some cases, protected from even self-awareness through justification or denial, and I commit to pull those places into the light, repent for harboring and nurturing them, and do the work required to banish them from both thought and practice.
It’s all any of us can do. When the world is on fire, we look inside and see if we’ve lit a match. It is no small thing to offer our own love and grace and brotherhood and sisterhood to our communities. What would happen if we walked straight over to the one person, the one group we most fear, most reject, most disparage, most misunderstand and reach our hands out for understanding and unity? If we sat down and said, ‘I’m listening. Tell me your story…’ I believe we would see healing in our time.”
Geneva Langeland (’13) survived graduate school with minimal blood loss, escaping with her ms in environmental policy and communication. She now works in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the communications editor at Michigan Sea Grant. There, she gets to hang out with educators, researchers, and communicators who love the Great Lakes as much as she does.
