They say hindsight is 20/20.  Duh.  What about the opposite of hindsight, which would be foresight?

Well, that would have come in handy the other day in Binghamton now, wouldn’t it?  Before the massacre at the immigration office, where over a dozen innocent lives were lost, gunned down in minutes, in the opposite of what would be considered a bloody blaze of glory.

Raise your hand if you’re sick of it. 

Even worse, raise your hand, slowly now, if this incident, this latest mass shooting, didn’t stun you.  Okay, say it did stun you, but maybe not as much as the other ones.  All gory, all shocking, all outrageous, just someow, sadly not as stunning.
I’m raising my hand.  I’m admitting to being a little less stunned.  Equally sickened, but admittedly less stunned, and I’m disgusted with myself about it.  Another day, another massacre.  Turn the page please.

Not really.  I don’t mean it’s not big news, because I know it is.  It’s not like I’m yawning my way through the story, trying to move on to the coupon section.  It’s just I’m aware of an icy turning point in my psyche I suppose, one that I would never have considered, never imagined, where the idea of an everyday massacre would seem like ordinary news.  Commonplace even. Not quite business as usual, but almost.

You know those photos, where we see families walking among the rubble, in far away lands, where war is part of their everyday, and we observe how at ease their body language seems to be in the midst of it?  That’s what I’m noting here.  The kind of eerie ordinariness of it.  Again.

The vibrations of horror, or our response to horror, may be becoming a little more subdued.  If you imagine the vibrations like ripples in a pond, the rings that form when a fish jumps, then submerges, maybe the fish that was giant before, creating large and multiple rings, has somehow gotten smaller, creating faint lines, faint rings, fading almost as soon as they are formed.

That’s not a good thing,  this realizing that response to horror is becoming a little more palatable.  Like it’s something I’m good at, or better at.  I don’t want to be good at that at all, no one does.  No one should be.

But it’s not like we’re trying to be good at it.  It’s something that seems to occur with practice.  The more practiced we are, the ‘better’ we get.  The foresight.  In hindsight, it’s too easy to say, ‘hey—he seemed a little strange that morning.’  Hindsight, foresight.
More foresight please.