It's all too much
Sorry, we're not talking about the Padres today.
My apologies to those of you who are looking for some Padres baseball talk this morning, but I don’t think I can. And, based on how many of you opened or read my post on Luke Voit yesterday, most of you can’t either.
I want to write about the Padres. I want that escape in my brain to something that isn’t terrifying or depressing. Hell, most of you reading this literally pay for the service of me writing about the Padres every weekday morning and sending it to you. If this post today makes you feel raw about that relationship, and makes you want to unsubscribe, I apologize and I understand.
It’s all just too much. Third graders being shot with a weapon that disfigures them to the point of being unidentifiable except through DNA. Parents being tackled to the ground in the parking lot by police while they could hear their children being shot. A pandemic that won’t go away. An economy that feels like it’s on the brink of disaster, or at the very least is making it harder for people to live their every day lives. A political climate that feels less like country-building and more like a bubbling civil war.
I’ve been lucky enough to have people in my life tell me that it’s okay if this is all too much, and I’m here to say the same. If you feel completely and totally overwhelmed, incapacitated by the images in your head, that’s okay. It doesn’t make you lesser or weak, it makes you human. And, sometimes, baseball can’t fix that.
While I write this, I am sitting next to my 4-year old daughter. She is a sensitive child, afraid of surprises and prone to emotional toddler meltdowns, and every time I’ve closed my eyes over the last two days, I can’t help but imagine how she would react if someone walked into her classroom with a gun and the intention to kill her and her classmates.
For some parents, the imagining isn’t about what would happen to their kid but what did happen. They’ll never hold their child’s hand again, and they’ll spend the rest of their lives knowing that they were unable to protect them. We, as a country, can no longer protect our own children because we refuse to prioritize their lives over the rights for Americans to hold weapons of mass death and destruction.
This is all so stupid and so painful and I’m tired of living it over and over again, just waiting for the day when my living it will be more directly tied to the life of my only child. I’m sick of it. I’m one that believes that you should leave things better than the way you found them, and that includes this country, and now I’m one who sits here wondering if I did a disservice to my daughter by even bringing her into this broken world and country.
Try and be good to each other. Nobody is handling the current situation well, although we’re all doing as well as we can. The first step towards fixing this is caring for one another.
I’ll be back with more Padres stuff tomorrow. Hopefully. Until then, I’d recommend listening to some of this:
It's just awful. There is always hope, even in the worst of tragedies because we still feel like it might get better one day, without knowing how. They talk about mental health issues, and clearly, to me if you go shoot at people whether they are adults or children, you most likely have a mental problem. What gets me is that so many people, especially those that we elected to power (even if we personally didn't vote for them) don't have the 'courage' to initiate some change. What we currently have, just doesn't work. We can spend billions of dollars on vaccines and Ukraine (which I agree with) when we NEED to, but I'll never understand how we can't make some hard calls like background checks, automatic locks on school doors from outside entry (I just heard this school had an open door the shooter walked through, but I don't know if its true, yet still) and just more Gun Safety. I mean, at some point, the human life we value so much, that we want to jail women who make a choice to have an abortion, should matter just as much when it's an actual human being living and walking among us. So...I try my best to Keep the Faith. In all of it, and even something as small as The Padres.
Thanks for not talking about the Padres this morning. We need to talk about what is happening outside of sports to hang on to our humanity. Your words were helpful to me. To me it’s an and not an or - we need gun control laws AND support for mental health AND to fight against racism and oppression AND I think background checks and banning assault rifles is a good way to start. Thanks again!