What Happens in Vegas

I was in the second grade the day that the twin towers fell.

I had just graduated high school when a man from my community murdered one of my friends.

I was getting ready to start college when I heard about a man who had opened fire in a midnight showing of a movie in Aurora, Colorado, where one of my co-workers had family who had planned to go to the showing.

I had just finished my first semester of college when someone entered an elementary school and killed twenty children and six teachers. Eleven days before Christmas.

I was a junior in college when I learned about, studied, and pondered over the mysterious case of Elliot Rodger.

Today, I was 23 and in my second year of grad school when I learned that 50 people were killed and over 500 are injured after a shooting in Las Vegas at a concert early this morning. One of my best Omaha friend's parents were at the concert. My friend who lives in Los Angeles reported a gloomy, sad, scared vibe today throughout the city. It seems as though the older I get, the closer to home these things become. My life has had these unpredictable and scary events for as long as I can remember, and I can't tell if the world is actually getting scarier, or I'm just getting older.

Keep in mind that the list I gave doesn't include EVERYTHING that's happened in my lifetime, and it certainly doesn't include things that are tragedies but with more natural causes, like hurricanes or earthquakes.

For the most part, these tragedies have, as shameful as I feel saying it, disappeared. They are no longer on my radar, even though there's a family out there who celebrates Christmas each year without one of their children, someone out there who struggles through September 11 every year and remembers the bravery of their spouse, and, right this very second, people who do not know if their loved ones came home from that concert last night. All because of....?

I don't know the because. I don't know why these things happen. Honestly, I don't even know where to start looking. Is it on purpose? Did someone truly, in their right mind, want to kill 20 kindergartners? Is it mental illness that does not allow them to think clearly? (This is not an excuse, but I do enjoy studying the brain, and it is real stuff when people have things like biological changes, undiagnosed tumors, etc. in certain parts of their brain.) Was this person just really, really, angry about some unrelated circumstance and that's how they took it out?

I believe that gun control is a serious issue in our country. I believe that mental health is also an issue in our country, and our healthcare laws don't do us any favors. I believe that many, many factors influence situations like today and the people who make such sad choices. What I also know is that a political decision, law, or party affiliation does not have the power that people like to give it. If you think that 'if everyone abided by this law or voted this way, this issue would be fixed' then you are wrong. (Hint: criminals don't follow laws. Making things illegal does not stop the use of them.)  However, I'm not all that knowledgeable or interested in politics. I try really hard to pay attention to educate myself enough to vote, but they just do not come naturally to me, and I don't believe they should have to. I trust that there are important and educated people out there (some harder to find than others) who are destined for political office and I am just destined to know the very, very minimum of it all. I don't believe that it is my responsibility to be knee deep in politics all the time. However - that's not to say I don't have responsibility.

A few things that I believe that are relevant today:

1. I believe that God creates people of all talents, skills, and interests in this world. Just because you do not understand it or even like it does not make it bad, but it means that we have to come together, as no one can do it alone.
2. I believe that, even if I wanted nothing more, and had the time and money to hop on a plane there may not be a job for me in Vegas right now. There might be. But there also might not be.

More importantly...

3. My proximity to the disaster does not excuse my inaction.
4. Hate does not drive out hate, it only magnifies it.

Let me be very clear here: What happens in Vegas DOES NOT STAY THERE.

I have seen on Facebook all day today posts about needing people to donate blood, as there are hundreds of people fighting for their lives in Nevada right now who need it. I'm not sure how the whole blood thing works - can they transport it that far? If not, maybe this isn't a job for my friends on the east coast reading this.  Financial compensation, in almost any scenario, can always be used. Now, some of us are graduate students who don't exactly have a lot to give, or anywhere to give it. That's okay too.

I have seen several posts today about 'keeping your thoughts and prayers because they wont fix the loss of 50+ lives' (that number has gone up since I started writing this) today, and that's true, that we can't expect prayer to do all the work. We are responsible for action. But, if you are the praying type, you know that prayer. does. work. You should do that. Now and Always. But not everyone was meant to be a prayer warrior - some people are meant to serve behind the scenes with prayer and be on the front lines in other, equally as helpful and skilled, ways.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway I wish this world would understand is about unity. I have seen so many posts, articles, pictures... captioned with 'We as a country have got to learn how to be together or this will never stop.' And that is exactly right. What I think that most people don't understand, though, is that many times, that isn't about racism, or a fight over religion, or issues like abortion or gun control. Unity does not begin by you standing up to say that you can get along with someone who is very different from you, but it starts with the people who are the closest to us. One person making this world a better place does not start with anything but being nice to the person next to you. It means developing friendships, learning about others, and living with people, not next to them.

You may have heard of the research project called Six Degrees of Separation. Google will be much more helpful to you if you want to look into this more, but it was basically a study done that found that you are, at no time, farther from any one person on this earth by more than six 'friend of a friend's.' Obviously there's probably no way to prove this is exactly correct, and this study was also done in 1930, so the population of the world has maybe grown and changed since then. But what is it like to consider that you might be that close to someone involved in any one of these situations, regardless of their status in it? What if your kind word, your inclusion, your willingness to be vulnerable and try something new with or for a total stranger, meant you had an effect on those around you that changed the rest of their life, and maybe the paths of the lives around them? My friend Brenna was excellent at this type of pond rippling kindness. We should all be able to do this.

A commencement speech from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014 has gone viral on YouTube (I'll attach the link below) and it begins with the simple command of making your bed each day because this is a task accomplished. Whether you choose making your bed or not, I don't think really matters here - I think that the key is diligence. Admiral William McRaven tells about his own challenges during his training in the service, one particularly rough night where his group spent the night up to their neck in cold mud - teeth chattering so loud they couldn't hear one another. He claims that one member's singing, which ultimately led to the singing of many, got them through the night, despite the voices of their superiors telling them to stop singing, or they would regret it. He says he believes that it is only the smallest acts required that will really change the world.

I am not saying that prayer and kind words will stop the violence in this country, because they won't. But I can't imagine that they wouldn't help. In my opinion, this battle has three parts - hope, prayer, and action. Any two without the third will not get us very far. Our country seems to come together best in the face of tragedy, so it would be really cool if we could figure out how to come together before these things happen. Even if today is the very last shooting in the entire world forever, I'm still going to spend the rest of my life wondering why humans want to kill other humans, because that very question has changed my life in so many ways. I'm always going to wonder how my actions in middle school P.E. could have changed the fate of the person who killed my friend - what could I have done differently? Even if my actions can't change the past, they may be able to change the future. One minuscule action from the several million people in this country could turn into something really great. What if we, the diverse body of this country, used the tune and song that we sang the very best to make this world just a little better?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6OoCaGsz94&app=desktop