TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

I was in college when the Columbine mass shooting happened. I remember watching it on the news: Two high school students in trench coats with guns, hunting their teachers and fellow students. It was shocking to me. I think, at the time, it was shocking to everyone. What would drive two teenagers to plan and carry out a massacre at a suburban high school? How could something like this happen?

I thought it was a freak occurrence. Now that seems hopelessly naïve. Since Columbine we’ve watched it happen, again and again. It’s chilling that mass shootings happen on such a regular basis, they are now an expected part of American life. It’s chilling and infuriating. I find myself asking, Why do we keep accepting this? Why, when there are real steps we can take to stop it?

When another one happens, we know it won’t be the last. And when another one happens, I wonder how long it will hold our collective attention. I wonder how long the shock and grief and rage will last, before people begin to change the channel, or scroll to the next story, or change the topic of conversation. 

I don’t ever want to become desensitized to this kind of horror. Even though it hurts. When I read about yet another mass shooting at a school, a church, a concert, a festival or parade, I want to feel shock, and rage, and confusion, and fear. I want to feel all of it, every single time, because that is an appropriate response. If I stop feeling these things so viscerally, if I disengage, I would be a shell of myself.

I also recognize that it’s not enough to be horrified, to be angry, to be heartbroken. I need to use those emotions as fuel. I need to use them to spur me into action—to donate to grassroots organizations like Moms Demand Action, to contact my representatives, to walk the walk. Moms Demand Action, after all, was started by a mom who felt helpless because of gun violence and wanted to do something. We can all do something.

Today’s poem invites us to look at ourselves at this moment of extreme, ongoing gun violence in America. And to think about our own responses, time after time after time. 

Alive at the End of the World
by Saeed Jones

The end of the world was mistaken

for just another midday massacre

in America. Brain matter and broken

glass, blurred boot prints in pools

of blood. We dialed the newly dead

but they wouldn’t answer. We texted,

begging them to call us back, but

the newly dead don’t know how to 

read. In America, a gathering of people

is called target practice or a funeral,

depending on who lives long enough

to define the terms. But for now, we

are alive at the end of the world,

shell-shocked by headlines and alarm

clocks, burning through what little love

we have left. With time, the white boys

with guns will become wounds we won’t 

quite remember enduring. “How did you

get that scar on your shoulder?” “Oh,

a boy I barely knew was sad once.”

“Alive at the End of the World" by Saeed Jones from ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD © 2022 Saeed Jones. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Coffee House Press.