Today, I am all for rewarding courage.
I was in transit, somewhere between Manchester and Detroit, when my friend Carolyn Choate called me, catching me just as I was about to board a plane for Chicago.
“Have you checked in with Julie?” she asked me.
Maybe it was the fog of travel, or the disorientation of making my way from terminal A to terminal B in Detroit, but I wasn’t sure why Carolyn was asking. She couldn’t know that the adjustment curve for my youngest at Portland State College in Oregon has been a big one.
“No, why?” I said.
And that’s how I found out about the mass shooting on a college campus in Oregon. It is far enough away from Julie that I knew she was safe, but too close to home for me as a mom to feel at ease.
Then I read this piece by Michael Daly, who has it right. It’s not about the madness that gave us yet another terrifying headline. It certainly won’t be about gun control, although at some point it has to be.
We should not give the gunman what he sought, which was a dark and twisted notoriety.
Today, I am choosing to dwell on the forces of good, not evil, in this world. From a grateful mother to the Umpqua Community College student and Army veteran who took five bullets as he tackled the shooter and is a real life super hero: Thank you Chris Mintz, for taking action.
Now it’s time for the rest of us to figure out what we need to do so that this kind of tragedy never happens again in the U.S.
