Ask my grandparents what time it was when they discovered Pearl Harbor had been attacked and they can tell you.
My parents, although young, remember exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas.
I'm able to recall the exact thought that flashed through my 10-year-old mind in the moments leading up to the World Trade Center collapsing into the Manhattan skyline:
"I wonder if Dad and I can order pizza tonight…"
...Unfortunately, I'm also able to tell you that I was dressed in a Garfield plaid skirt and a Brownell-Talbot high school tennis jersey when Seung-Hui Cho carried out a mass murder inside the walls of Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007.
I remember my mom and babysitter crying as my dad struggled to explain to a five-year-old dressed in navy blue corduroys and froggie Wellingtons why half a building was missing in Oklahoma City.
I know I was an angsty teenager, swearing off the human race entirely because Under Oath's new album rang in my headphones, sounding too different, too produced, not because the death toll at Fort Hood had climbed to Lucky Number 13.
I was sitting in my mom's living room, smelling fresh coffee, listening to a clamor of rooks singing in the garden, still in my pajamas…an Obama "Hope '08" t-shirt, actually...as an assassination attempt at Senator Gabrielle Giffords in 2011 ended in the murder of a second grader who wanted to grow up to be President of the United States.
I was in one of my best friend's bedrooms in Bend, Oregon talking about the "thunderstorm of the century," when an entire theatre of innocent people was shot to oblivion during a film about a hero who doesn't believe in death as justice or revenge...
...However, most vividly, I remember collapsing on my bed in Central London, completely dumbfounded and just hours from returning home to my own parents in Omaha, Nebraska for the first time in months, when I realized that so many parents at Sandy Hook Elementary School would never have the luxury of holding their 21-year-old daughter once she strode down the long international arrivals terminal, taking respite in their arms from a wearying and exciting adventure. In fact, that evening, they'd come home to an empty house.
Every generation has a "flashbulb" moment in which the horrible circumstances it illuminates will be forever immortalized. Even worse than the luminosity of a national tragedy is when the camera is being held by one of us.
Only so much blame can be placed on a natural disaster. It has "natural" in the name…something about that convinces us that it was permissible, or even meant to happen; certainly not anywhere in the neighborhood of being called a tragedy.
Nature is rational and cyclical. It only engages in what is essential to maintaining order.
People, however…there's nothing rational about us. Today's events in Boston have shown that.
Human life in general is a caricature of the ironic: Thousands came out to run today and will be leaving the city missing both legs. April 15th happens to be Patriot Day, in which Boston celebrates its deep roots of revolutionary spunk and resilience, but this year the holiday is commemorated while the city struggles to its feet after being kicked into the dust.
…argued by many as the only species capable of empathy and compassion, today, some member of the human race lacks both. In fact, in my lifetime, the number of national tragedies at the hands of human beings leads me to think that the idea of inherent good is a farce. The concept of man being genuinely benevolent is an idealistic pipe dream in the hands of a few good, black sheep.
But, it's a concept I still choose to believe. Maybe it's false. So what? Believing in impossible pleasantries is still a hell of a lot nicer than being marooned in world of harsh realities.
Perhaps this time, just this once, if I keep telling myself I believe in the truth and the truth is what I believe, eventually they'll become one in the same.
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