Orlando: The sameness of tragedy
Seven days since the worst act of gun violence in this country's history took 49 lives, there are fathers on this Father's Day who are mourning instead of celebrating. When does it end? The answer to that question, says Lee Cowan, remains elusive.
You might not have known it, but last week was National Flag Week. Yet we spent most of it with the nation's flags at half-staff.
Of course, what happened in Orlando last weekend is but the latest in the terrible accounting of these sorts of things. Once again, we found ourselves struggling to separate the strands of anger, sorrow, shame and anguish.
"I don't know where my son is," Christine Leinonen was recorded saying last Sunday. "No one can tell me where my son is, if he's been shot, if he'd dead. No one knows."
The bodies of her son, Christopher Drew Leinonen, and his partner, Juan Guerrero, were found side-by-side on the floor of the Pulse nightclub.
They had been seeing other for almost two years -- inseparable in life, and in death, it seems.
Brenda McCool had gone to the club with someone, too: her son, Isaiah, one of 12 children she raised who watched her beat cancer twice.
But that night her son watched his mother collapse in a hail of bullets -- bullets that nearly took him as well.
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He survived, but surviving that awful night came with its own kind of pain.
"The guilt of feeling grateful of being alive is heavy," Patience Carter said. "Wanting to smile about surviving, but not sure if the people around you are ready."
Carter penned that poem after making it out of the club safely with her friend, Akyra Murray. But they both ran back inside to get Akyra's cousin, Tiara Parker.
All three were soon trapped in the bathroom; all three were shot. Patience and Tiara made it to the hospital.
But Akyra would become the youngest of the 49 victims, just 18, barely out of high school.
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There are stories for each and every one of the Orlando victims. And for all the hate and horror and terror, the celebration of their lives has made city this both the saddest and most loving place in the country.
Still, the sameness of it all is simmering.
"I held and hugged grieving family members and parents and they asked, 'Why does this keep happening?'" said President Obama. "And they pleaded that we do more to stop the carnage. They don't care about the politics. Neither do I."
We used to expect change in the wake of the unspeakable. After Columbine, schools began installing metal detectors.
After the Oklahoma City bombing, federal buildings across the country became fortresses.
And of course, after 9/11, none of us ever got through an airport the same way again.
But on gun violence, we seem stuck -- and that inaction carries consequences.
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The phrase "thoughts and prayers" has become trite in the eyes of many. To some, moments of silence aren't much better.
"Silence? Not me. Not any more," said Democratic Congressman Jim Himes on Monday. "I will no longer stand here absorbing the faux concern, contrived gravity, and tepid smugness of a House complicit in the weekly bloodshed. Sooner or later the country will hold us accountable for our inaction. But as you bow your head and think of what to say to your God, when you are asked what you did to slow the slaughter of innocents, there will be silence."
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We cope, perhaps, by trying to compartmentalize it all. But where in our conscience do we find the room for still another shooting, another vigil, another funeral? There have been at least 15 already.
We go about what has become a routine of national mourning -- all well-intentioned, all necessary, but all far too familiar.
Some saw a rainbow over the Pulse nightclub last week, as a sign that perhaps the worst had passed -- that maybe love HAD won in the end.
But rainbows are fleeting. They will be back, but perhaps only after the next storm.