Can’t stop thinking of little Christina Taylor - the nine year old victim of Jared Lee Loughner’s seemingly random killing in Arizona on Saturday.
The child had been taken to hear her Congresswoman speak at a local supermarket. Christina had recently been elected to her primary school student council, and the neighbour thought she’d enjoy learning about politics from the Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords.
So there’s this eager clever child - connected enough with the world, already at the age of nine, to go an hear the talk from a local politician, and it is the last thing she’ll ever do. I am haunted by the thoughts of what the scenes are like in her family’s house these days, I search out the stories about Arizona like pushing a wobbly tooth, just for the exquisite pain of it.
The last few nights, haunted by the face of this pretty child, I”ve taken to going into the daughterlets’ bedroom at night and watching them as they sleep in each other’s arms, listening to their joint breathing, holding their warm little hands and feeling this sense of - what would you call it? A kind of choking, sad, grateful, thrust of love and terror.
If a child can be randomly killed like that - a local event in a distant state in the US - what guarantee do any of us have that our children will be safe.
on Jan 19th, 2011 at 8:56 pm
Time and distance do make for powerful impacts upon the lack of safety guarantees in life anywhere on the planet. As circumstances change, and one has a family to consider and protect from the world’s evils, one tends to forgo experiences closer to home and to themselves. In the years since Pym Fortouyn was shot dead in the area of RNW’s parking lot, the recent shooting tragedy across the Atlantic has focused on what can happen to loved ones. To worry over what may happen is only human and outside of anyone’s control. To speculate over what could have happened to any employee of RNW when Fortouyn was killed is equally a helpless situation. Many aspects of those there in their personal and family lives could also been changed in a place they feel among the most secure to be. All one can do is live the cautious it is possible to be without surrendeing the basic freedoms of life, and let fate be what will come of it.