Mass killings are happening at such an alarming rate that most of us can’t even remember when – or why – the most recent killing spree filled our Twitter feeds or our TV screens. Grieving faces, flowers and candles left on street corners, and empty rhetoric about “thoughts and prayers” blur together. We grow numb.

Our current political dialogue warps everything it touches so that we talk past each other. Let’s forget politics, for a moment, and contemplate our current moment from our hearts. In the first weeks of August my heart is heavy with grief and dread.

Too many dead children, too many violent, lost, scared young men susceptible to the morally bankrupt rhetoric of political leaders who appear to revel in toxic masculinity, in “my way or the highway,” and traffic in language that is divisive and inflammatory. Words matter. And no amount of backtracking now can erase the terrible cruelty of what has already been said.

Our country is unraveling. We are in trouble. Wiser heads than mine will analyze the many factors, recite the statistics, propose the solutions. But the mothers and fathers who have lost their children – and that includes the parents of the shooters – will never be the same. No one can replace what has been taken from them.

My daughter died 27 years ago, at the age of 19, after a fall from a horse and a devastating brain injury. She was out larking around, riding bareback, and got bucked off. No one meant to harm her. No one wearing a mask and body armor with 250 rounds of ammunition in high capacity magazines and an assault rifle marched out to the Morgan Territory and started shooting. No one wrote a hate-filled manifesto and posted it on the Internet.

Maya’s death was an accident. But it ripped me apart and turned my life upside down and made me fear for the life and well-being of my surviving child and my own sanity. It’s more than two decades ago now and I still suffer from PTSD. The effects of sudden loss – especially violent loss – cannot be erased with “thoughts and prayers.”

To heal, I had to act, to reach out for support. And in turn, to support other bereaved parents. To become one of the people Fred Rogers called “helpers,” the people children – or adults – could turn to whenever they feel afraid. “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” was full of helpers, and the greatest was Fred Rogers himself.

We need a country full of Fred Rogers’ right now, men and women in brown and green sweaters, singing comforting songs and sheltering children, making them feel welcome and safe, being kind. We need to stand up to bullies, confront hate and intolerance wherever it manifests, and find ways to calm our overtaxed nervous systems and uplift our grieving hearts.

I ask myself again and again how best to use the gift of a long life, and the privilege of living it in good company in a beautiful setting in Northern California. What can I do? What can we do to help our country heal?

When I ask these questions, this image appears: Earth rise as seen for the first time by humans in an Apollo space capsule as they orbited the moon more than 50 years ago. A small, fragile-looking blue ball wrapped in white, glowing as it rose above the dark side of the moon.

https://live.staticflickr.com/6026/6003243718_027d191d59_z.jpg

It was home. It was us. And the men who saw it for the first time sent back photographs that showed our home from space, dwarfed by the galaxies, just one of many bodies floating in inky blackness. So beautiful it makes me gasp.

I’d like that image plastered on billboards, on screen savers, on T-shirts – not to sell anything. Just to remind us who and where we are. To give us perspective. Borders are made up. Hate and fear are constructs in our disturbed minds. As the bumper sticker says, “One planet, one people.”

If we learn to live on our fragile blue ball aware of our oneness, we might just be able to reject hate and knit together the frayed edges of grieving communities across this country.

Author’s note: This post will appear in slightly different form in the Rossmoor News on August 14 in my column “On the Bright Side.”

Photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video on Visualhunt.com / CC BY