Bad News

Elected officials as corporate puppets, the longest war in American history, terrorism, gun violence, drone strikes, climate change. Any of you still reading? It's easy to want to look away, throw our hands in the air.

It's hard to contemplate the world that our children will inherit.

I remember Walter Cronkite in black and white voicing over horrific pictures of children whose bodies were distorted, ravaged by hunger. Stick legs carrying bloated stomachs. Arms too weak to swat the flies away from their faces. The eyes of the mothers were animated with anguish.

My father sat on the couch watching, too. The images didn't seem bother him like they did me. Looking back on it now, I think I misread his helplessness for callousness.

I asked him why their stomachs looked like they did. My father, the scientist, could answer that question. When I asked him why we let children die from hunger, the scientific method seemed to fail him.

"It's complicated."

I remember thinking that I would do better, if I were a grown-up.

That day, my father fell off the pedestal on which I had placed him. Sooner or later, all parents fall, like Icarus flying too close to the sun.

We are not invincible, like our children believe. Like we would like them to think. Like I believed my father was back then.

Right now, Claire is ignorant to the suffering of the world. I am her sun. She circles me confidently and predictably, like a planet.

She will come to expect answers one day. As she should. As we all do.

Really, I'm stuck with a question though. I ask myself the question that I posed to my father then; Why is it so complicated?

I can answer it the same way my father did...I don't know.


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