Editor’s Note: Slow out of the gate this morning, not through sloth but for preparations for the pool opening and the vital Firts plunge. More on that in a separate missive. In the meantme, Marlow is still trying to make sense of it all.
– Vic
Author’s note: This is the second of a two part post that explores the outer limits of what we could do going forward after Manchester.
Comfortably Numb
Or . . . we and the rest of the world could continue doing what we have been doing with incremental symbolic actions that politicians and opinion makers toss around like manhole covers be seen as doing something.
For example, NATO announced in response to Manchester that would form another high level task force on intelligence sharing. To which most thoughtful readers sowed their coffee on the computer keyboards.
Meanwhile less than 24 hours after the Manchester incident, talking heads on American cable TV shows were openly supportive of having conversations with our children regarding how street smart they needed to be when a mass casualty event begins to occur around them.
Tacit in these discussions is the assumption that mass casualty events are an unpreventable part of our children’s lives, so tough noogies. Deal with it, my precious ones. Let us teach them to risk manage their own lives’ mortally threatening events. So much for childhood.
American kids aren’t stupid. What should be our parental responses during these chats when they ask us the ultimate WTFO questions — is this all we can do or should do? Turn the other cheek (pun intended), when we run away to save our own asses? No run-to-the sounds-of-gun-fire? No proactive measures from us parents to protect them?
Are we adults already that comfortably numb to this carnage?
Sure, we shall build walls, analogue and digital, layers and layers of them, but all of them will be outside of our constitutional borders. Yeah, some attacks will leak through but relatively speaking we Richie Rich Americans will be statistically safer that the rest of the world. Yet, American innocents will still be slaughtered.
How convenient for the zero defect generation to so blithely accept the consequences of these terrorist behaviors.
So to this author, if this is the path America is about to more fully embark on, we had better teach our kids a path to comfortable numbness to the loss of their cohorts. Sort of a proactive grief counseling.
In need of grief counseling
Hello? Hello? Hello?
Is there anybody alive there
Just click your phone if you feel me
Cause there’s no one at home
Come on now
We sense you’re feeling down
Yeah another couple kids have fallen down the drain
Get yourself on your feet again
Relax
Just Facebook up some information first
Just the basic facts
That’ll tell you how much and long it’ll hurt
Soon there’ll be no pain, it is receding
A distant city’s smoke on the horizon
We’ll stop the next attack waves
Your fingers move but I can’t see if you’re texting
When we were kids we had scarlet fever
Hands and face felt like red hot balloons
Now we’ve got that feeling once again
We can’t explain you would not understand
This is not how we were
We have now become comfortably numb
Okay
These attacks are just little pinpricks
There’ll be no more, ah
But you may feel a little sick
You’ll stand up in a while
Our defenses we do believe are working,
That’ll get you up, there’s another music show
Come on it’s time to go
Soon there’ll be no pain, it is receding
A distant city’s smoke on the horizon
We’ll stop the next attack waves
Your fingers move but we can’t see what you’re texting
When we were kids we had scarlet fever
Hands and face felt like red hot balloons
Now we’ve got that feeling once again
We can’t explain you would not understand
This is not how we were
Long ago we became comfortably numb
You children will soon grow up
The dream will fade
You will become comfortably numb
Copyright © 2017 From My Isle Seat/Pink Floyd
www.vicsocotra.com
Editor’s Note: This is an addendum to yesterday’s post from Marlow’s Coastal Empire.
-Vic
Addendum
Thanks to their parents’ decisions and social media, our clever, networked but innocent girls and boys now know something.
After our chats with our kids, they will no longer be ordinary children living in an ordinary little towns. They now will wake up every morning of the rest of their lives, uncomfortably knowing perfectly well that there’s something out in the world to not just trouble but kill them. They will no longer go through an ordinary day nor sleep their nights untroubled, full of ordinary peaceful dreams.
They can no longer live in a dream. They’re blind sleepwalkers, walking about a world that is a foul sty.
Copyright 2017 My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com