Sharing EVERYTHING in the ICT, and oh yeah, the Planet. A reflection on the media’s role in the Newtown tragedy, and how it changed Who I Am.

I woke up Wednesday morning my body almost immobilized from the ratcheting up of the muscles in my neck, my lower back, both my shoulders, impinged, of course, my cubital and carpel tunnel in my left arm, and weird, even my jaw was locked.

Why?  What could possibly explain these physical conditions coming out of nowhere?  I didn’t fall yesterday.  I wasn’t in an accident.  In fact, I had done my QiGong for the first time in 5 days yesterday.  It felt like I had been hit by a truck.

Half in my dream state still, I answered myself:  You were hit.  By a tragedy 1850 miles away.  But as I managed to get out of bed, since I had to (a Snow Day at home with the kids!), and as my Theta waves acted up to their Beta counterparts, my brain said:  “That’s hokum!  An event 1850 miles away canNOT broadside your body!  It’s got to be something else. You’re just obsessing over those families and you need to stop it!”

I had a lot of time to reflect yesterday, because, alone with the kids or not, I was practically paralyzed to do anything physical. My kids are quite able to play for hours and hours since we don’t have TV, and they let me lay there staring at the ceiling, since that was the only position that eased my pain any.

I took Sally for a walk, and threw a stick a dozen or more times.  Had I gotten wild with her? Did we juke and jive too many times, and I threw my back out without knowing it?  I reviewed   the walk in it’s entirety, and NO, I was tired then and not wanting to play wild.

Had I eaten something that had triggered a neurological response and brought back every injury I had ever had to my body, all at the same time?  I know nothing about neurology.

I had flown to New Orleans on Friday and Monday.  Did the plane dip and jerk in the turbulence, throwing me out of alignment?  No.  They were both fairly uneventful flights, save for almost every single traveller swiping their card so they could watch Friday’s events unfold.

I had trimmed down my QiGong practice while in New Orleans, as well as my left arm therapy stretches.  That was probably it.

Then, this morning, talking to my wife before the kids were awake, she confessed to me that she hadn’t allowed herself to look at one single photograph, listen to one audio interview, and that all the information she has received has been through me and through her patients.  You see, she works in the field of mental health, and wondered out loud to me: “How much of this trauma that is not ours should we allow ourselves to be open to?”

And that was when I remembered how I REALLY allowed myself to cry on Tuesday, when everyone was off to work and school.  I had allowed myself to fully go to the place where I lost MY child through a tragedy such as this.  I cried with the intensity that leaves you breathless and winced up around your gut, the cry that literally paralyzes You.

So, yes, my physical condition is due to choices that I made, breaks in healthy routines, too much spicy over processed foods, perhaps even tapping away on this computer for half the day!  But I cannot deny that allowing myself to see those images of parents grieving, to listen to that audio of touched townsfolk, and to hear the description of what that weapon was capable of, contributed to the end result that is my physical condition.

I tried to stay away from the media.  In public places:  airports, restaurants, hotels, even scrolling under something else you’re watching, it was VERY difficult to get away from it.

The only way I could get away from it was to shut down and ignore all my social media, avoid all public places, and basically, drop out of the society. Stay away from People?  I LOVE people!

This sucks, and I can’t stand things that suck.  I want to CHANGE them.

So, here is what I propose, though I think people who make a living on the up-to-the-minute newscast will not find this solution agreeable:

As a nation, we need to write an essential agreement into law that states that those involved directly in traumatic events will be left alone until they choose to come to us to share.  Camera and audio recording device use will be prohibited by all but a specially appointed team of professionals who study these events for the sole purpose of ensuring that they never happen again.

I know not everybody feels things as deeply as I do, and I envy the capacity to NOT go there that so many people seem to possess.  My only consolation is that somehow, in taking on the indescribable loss that the people of Newtown are experiencing, in allowing myself these sympathy pains, it will lighten their load; I will have somehow taken just a small piece of their substantial suffering, and that President Obama is right when he says:  “You are NOT alone.”