On a break at work yesterday I checked the feeds. It was a menagerie of horrors.
In the span of about five minutes, I saw:
The body of a slain child on a police officer’s body cam footage
The police shoot the killer, a deranged woman
A man stabbed to death in front of a Starbucks. His family watched him die, face-down in his blood
A man sat at a table sipping his coffee while it happened
Overwhelming joy on the face of the young man filming the slaughter. He seemed to be gleeful at the “awesome” scene he captured. “Bro – this is going viral!” (My take).
The West is diseased. We’ve lost the courage to stand up to evil. I believe it’s irretrievably lost.
I wondered, as I contemplated these horrors, how we’ve managed to shield our kids from “reality” for so long. We’ve taken many precautions, and we try every day to show them actual reality, which most of the world would call fantasy or wish fulfillment. Our greatest desire is to preserve their innocence, despite the darkness rising everywhere around us. The darkness isn’t just out on the edges now, somewhere out beyond the firelight. The light of civilization is going out, and the darkness is moving in.
One of the dead children in the Tennessee Christian school was the pastor’s child. I’m sure the pastor and his wife had done everything they could to give their family, both immediate and church, an oasis in the badlands of The World. But all it took was somebody else’s broken child, encouraged by smirking, whispering ideologues, to think the unthinkable, and then do it.
The killer’s parents did the best they could, I’m sure. I wouldn’t think to judge them in any way. However, if I can speculate based on numerous other anecdotes I’m personally familiar with or have read about, they might be guilty of one thing: underestimating the reality of the world we live in now. We hope and we protect and we pray and we keep to our own. We don’t believe the unimaginable can happen to us. I mean, come one, we’re…us. And then, one day, the Reaper stands at the foot of your bed.
Even after a bullet takes out a brother or sister standing right next to us, we still don’t believe our own ticket can be punched.
One of my girls asked me the other day what would happen if a “bad guy” managed to abduct one of them. I’ve often wondered if we’ve gone too far with that theoretically innocuous phrase: “bad guys.” Of course we can’t tell them what awaits them if they fall into the web of traffickers and demoniacs out there, but we have to make them aware that danger exists just beyond this sanctuary of stuffies and LEGO and snuggles. So, we soft-peddle it. “Bad guys” doesn’t seem to quite cover it…
It was one of those out-of-the-blue questions that, as a parent, you just have to volley on the spot without even a moment do some stretches. My girls wanted to go play in the cul-de-sac in front of our home. It’s a place that, not so many years ago, I wouldn’t have thought for a moment could become the starting point of a lifelong horror. But these days, with petty theft and rumors of certain vehicles rolling slowly through the streets of our boring suburban neighborhood, there’s no room for complacency.
“What would they do to us if they stole us, Daddy?” my ten-year-old baby girl asked again.
I paused for a long time, staring at her so long that she laughed, thinking I was making a funny face. But then her face darkened, understanding only that she had blundered into A Serious Moment.
And in that moment I felt like an actual iron portcullis dropped down between innocence and reality. I grasped for words that I could use to convey the gravity of the danger without inadvertently, ironically, destroying her innocence. In that moment, I was far away, or maybe not so far… I knew there was a life, adjacent to this one, in which, if she was taken from me by the darkness, I would pray for her to be dead rather than suffer what I know awaits stolen children.
“You would be hurt, baby girl,” I said. “That’s all you need to know. You would be hurt. So please don’t play by the street without us there.”
My sons are imaginative, creative, curious, and far more intelligent than me. And they’re still innocent. Even my 15-year-old. He still calls me, “Daddy,” and his devotion to a particular toy consumes him. I worry about him. Is he falling behind? Is he too immature for his age?
My other son is off-the-charts smart in every category. He’s a builder of things, too. He needs to create. And he needs to run, climb, compete. Our circumstances have denied so much of that to him, and he’s becoming bitter.
Still, his “snuggle tank” is filled every time we wrestle, or, as is his custom, he climbs up my body to perch on my shoulders. Like his older brother, he’s still an innocent in this world.
The world is coming for all of them. There are sparkling, digital places that pique their curiosity and even their creativity. Places by and for children. Places that even helicopter parents like us - the Apache helicopter variety armed to the teeth with good intentions and experience - fail to recognize as lethal. These places are known to the darkness, and it uses them as a hunting ground. Maybe it’s a direct message: “Meet me at the corner gas station…” Maybe it’s an indirect message: “Who told you that’s wrong?”
We didn’t need another school shooting to remind us that something has changed. It’s everywhere. It’s in the wind and the water. It’s not passive. We’ve seen – again – that it’s on the prowl, and it has made it manifestly clear what it wants. It’s not content with merely devouring most marriages or the souls of men and women, husbands and wives. It wants our thoughts, our language, and our will. And if it fails to get these, it will take our children.
Our boys aren’t afraid of bad guys. They like to tell me how they will beat them up. Older one started Krav a few weeks ago, and I think it’s finally gotten through to both that first option: run! No need to engage if you can get away.