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After Obama’s speech, a prayer for friends and links
(Tucson Citizen) – Each conversation seems so fragile, each participant so vulnerable, and I remember that it is a conversation, that that’s how we relate to each other, and that those links hold us together. Those links keep us from falling apart.
It is perhaps because I had been musing on the subject of links, networks of “friends” and “fans” and “followers,” that President Obama’s speech hit me so hard. We ought to remember that we live for each other. We owe each other. We depend on each other not only for political or economic or even cultural reasons. We depend on each other to know ourselves. It was when President Obama turned to Daniel Hernandez, the intern whose quick response may have saved the congresswoman’s life, that my nose began to run. Heroes, I think, are the ones for whom the links are closer to the surface. Hernandez surely qualifies. But if we all payed more attention, we might each qualify too.
I shudder by these thoughts how empty with love and links was the life of shooter Jared Loughner. A father who was drunk, unsociable and unemployed. Unable to make contact and completely turned into oneself. As last resort buying the gun, a token of power and might that would make people reckon with this lost soul. How can a human being fall into such darkness and emptiness when love is so distant.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
