Part of this post may sound a little awful. I'm sorry if it does, but I don't know if I can help it.
I learned from the Boston bombings that I've made quick progress toward feeling like a New Englander. Not that I was likely to have actually even gone (thanks to my dislike of driving there even when the traffic isn't as terrible as I presume it'd be on the day of the marathon), much less to've been around the marathon itself, but I had thought earlier last week about going to Boston over my Monday off of work, rather than going to New York State, as I ultimately did. And when I'd heard (flipping randomly about the AM radio stations as I drove from Binghamton to Red Hook, on my way to have dinner with Jodi before returning here) about the Boston Marathon tragedy, I thought of the city not just as where John and Libby live, or where I went in high school with choir, or where the hospital is in which Albert's father spent the last days of his life. I thought about it as being close to home, a place where some of my college's students might have been - pretty much local news. I thought of how, if I hadn't gone to New York that weekend, and if Jodi hadn't tagged my Facebook that morning with an excited status update about how I was coming, family and Binghamton friends might have wondered if I'd somehow been caught in the madness (and, as aforementioned, there would have been some chance, however small, that I'd at least have been stuck somewhere in the city).
But I didn't feel it as a New Englander exactly, either. I was sobered, and that night, driving along the MassPike, I put on Redeemer Pres's "Service of Hope" (from 2001, their first Sunday service after 9/11) - but in my head I was making a movie essentially about how, if Aquidneck Island ever underwent a tragedy, this was the kind of service I might put on if Megan and I and other people were holed up in the house, apparently a la Winter Storm Nemo, and collectively grieving. In other words, the Boston tragedy isn't really my own, although in some of its patterns I see echoes even of the Binghamton flood - memories of continuous radio coverage, of how everyone was first riveted and helpful and sad, but then soon, too soon, people wanted someone to blame.
The truth is that, given the shape of the world, what I'm mostly experiencing, I think, is tragedy fatigue, akin to the compassion fatigue from 2011, when it seemed like every place in the world experienced a natural disaster. When it comes to feeling any genuine horror, or deep anguish, or amazement that the world could be like this, I feel like I'm on the outside looking in.
Because, really. I was shocked, as an eighth-grader, by Columbine - the first major American tragedy that I can remember, the Oklahoma City bombing not really having been on my fourth-grade radar. Everything about such horrible events was new to me then. And September 11th was that multiplied - I remember spending much of social studies that day watching TV (bless Mrs. Hoelperl for not having kept it from us), including seeing footage of the second plane hit. Coming home, and not believing that the footage was airing of figures leaping from the towers. Later, or I think the next night, being alone upstairs in my parents' room, watching the coverage, genuinely feeling (quite possibly for the first time ever, as I'd always been made a big deal of by teachers and my parents and such) that my life was insignificant (though I don't think that lasted all that long). The feeling of change went on for months - I have poetry (bad poetry) from afterward, clumsy exploration of that day from both my own perspective and that of imagined others; and I remember noting somewhere (a journal? An e-mail to Elizabeth?) that one unexpected aftereffect (also noted by some newspaper columnist, experiencing it herself) was how I found in the following months that it took less to make me cry.
But after so many other floods and tsunami, hurricanes and tornadoes, shootings and general disasters demanding my attention and asking for my grief - New Orleans, Virginia Tech, the Binghamton shooting, the Binghamton flood (or floods, plural, to some extent), the Aurora shooting, Sandy Hook; they only represent a sample, of course - I just don't have much genuine grief to offer. It's not that I don't care, but I can't get a lot of strong emotion behind it. There's been too much shouting for a decade now, too many Facebook screamers posting graphics howling badly-researched "facts," too much political and rhetorical capitalization on every freaking unhappy thing. I know those things don't seem to necessarily relate to my capacity for grief, but it feels like they do, though they're not the only (and maybe not even the main) causes. I have very little energy left for hip-shot opinions; for people who want heads to roll; for people talking past each other; for people feigning indignant surprise at every new insult to injury by the stupid freaking Westboro Baptist Church (as though, after deliberately choosing hurtful and deeply offensive responses to every tragedy of the past fifteen years, they were likely to turn around and declare that today they're all Bostonians at heart), though that "church" deserves about as much of a hearing right now as a two-year-old having a tantrum.
We didn't spend time on the point, but the workbook that some of us at my new church have been using for Bible study pointed out tonight the essential unreliability of the idea, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." I'll tell you, I'm with him on that one. What doesn't kill you doesn't always make you stronger. And that's also true, maybe doubly true, of that which doesn't kill you, but does kill others.