They're having funerals for the people in Orlando now. It's a crazy time. A lot of people are trying to make this whole tragedy about their personal agendas. If you read the blog, you know how much I hate that. The dead need to be mourned. Let people mourn them and shut up about everything else. After all, the hard part is about to begin.
Many people died in the Orlando shooting, but a lot of other people didn't. Some of those people were injured and are still recovering. Others escaped unharmed by the shooting, though not unharmed by the shooter.
For everyone who survived what happened in that nightclub, their lives are forever altered. They now have to live with the knowledge that someone wanted to kill them. This person wanted to kill them enough that he brought a gun to the place where they were and tried to end their lives. They now understand hatred in a new way. And this understanding will change them. I'm not saying it will destroy them, but it will certainly change them and how they view the world.
When I was a kid, people hated my family enough to shoot at us and try to kill us. To understand someone could hate me enough (and mind you, at the time, I was under seven) to point guns at my home and shoot them opened up a kind of despair inside me I've never really moved past. I can't. And every time something like this happens and I think about the survivors, I wonder if they feel that same kind of disquiet.
This isn't something you can forgive. I mean, I guess you can, but it doesn't change anything. While you can harbor negative emotions towards the people who did this, that is far, far less jolting that the emotions you keep towards just, I guess life in general. It's less about them and more about just the horrible reality of knowing someone wanted to kill you.
If you have to face this reality, you're not really the person you were before. You can't be. The world isn't the same world it was before.
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