Monday Free Write

Happy Monday All!

Its the second Monday of June and we're all in full swing planning Blue's fourth birthday. (How is he already almost four?). And I had another post in mind for this week, but then I realized that this is the one year anniversary of the Pulse Massacre. So I put aside my other idea for tonight away and decided instead to reflect on that moment in time.

If you will recall it took me two weeks of free writes to properly write about my experience last year. It was definitely rough... to say the least. I wasn't born in Orlando, but I've been in the area since I was 5 (minus a few years, when I was college) and it just seemed like such a violation of everything I knew to be true about Orlando. Orlando is such a diverse city, it stills seems unthinkable that it happened... and yet it did...

And while I wasn't directly affected by the shooting, I still felt the aftershocks. There is nothing like a mass shooting in your city to make you feel utterly vulnerable. It also reminds you how important human life is. And I'm proud about the turn out of people to help out in any way they could. I still remember the lines to donate blood. (And how I tried to get Mike, and his probably O+ blood, to donate. He wouldn't and I never got around to it either...)

As for me, I used this as a diving board to deal with other tragedies that I definitely felt the aftershocks of but didn't know it at the time. That would mainly be Columbine. It happened so early in my schooling that until this past year, I wasn't aware how much it truly affected me until the Pulse shooting happened. So I finally read Columbine by Dave Cullen. It was definitely therapeutic to say the least.

And the strangest thing happened after I read it. I learned a lot about the mind of terrorist. Mainly that they get off on the fear they can cause. And not just in the area they are attacking at the time, but the total area the fear can spread to. (Which is quite large thanks to the media!). And you can definitely see that that's how every mass shooting or mass attack is happening anymore. They want you to be so afraid that you do whatever they want. (I've never actually seen it work out the way they plan though).

And overall things are looking up in Orlando and I'm proud that we've stood together in the face of this tragedy.