Crying out in our weakness

Hello again!

Maybe it’s that I suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, or that I’ve broken too many bones to enjoy weeks on end of rain, with nary a clearing, or the fact that I’ve probably been listening to Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinoise” album far too much; but today, for some reason, sitting here in greater Chicago, I’m thinking of tragedy.

Every place has little tragedies all the time – ah, life and the world, what cruel tricksters you can be! But what I’m talking about is the kind of flashy, epic horror that seeps into the consciousness and bubbles from the collective soul of a city, or a nation, and how we deal with that.

A mile up in the sky, they are still talking about Columbine. Like group therapy, people talk, and the news talks, and everyone talks about how two boys, alienated and angsty, suppressed and suppressed until, finally, there was a terrible eruption that killed kids; and killed everyone’s souls, just a little. To this day, say the word “bully” in a Denver school, and about 30 teachers and counselors will try to stage an intervention. It’s a red, angry scar; and the Front Range cries out in its weakness, to paraphrase Rumi, hoping that putting its greatest pain in the open will make its kids destined never to repeat it.

It’s in stark contrast to how Chicago’s northwestern suburbs (where I live) handle their own epic tragedy: John Wayne Gacy, Jr. I don’t know if it’s because more time has passed (he was executed five years before Columbine happened) or because the details of his crimes are so particularly chilling. But somehow, this didn’t even dawn on me until a few weeks ago, when one of my husband’s co-workers pointed out the restaurant where Gacy worked as a chef, only a couple of blocks from the office. Who knows whether he met any of his victims there? Whether their families still dine there? Whether they’ve been my husband’s customers? Who knows? People don’t talk about it. It’s as if, by burying it, it will go away forever; and maybe everyone will wake up one day and find that it never happened, that it was a nasty dream or a late-night movie and that there is, in fact, no scar at all.

I wonder how it is in Milwaukee, home of Jeffrey Dahmer, only an hour and a half from here?

I think there is a Midwestern tendency toward stoicism that leads people here to try to cover that scar through whatever might hide it. There is a value placed upon keeping one’s head up and lip stiff, of riding out the storm. It’s admirable, I suppose, and yet … I can’t help but worry that people will suppress and suppress until, one day, we will be helpless in front of the next terrible eruption, whatever it may be.