In wake of campus killings, I don’t know where to find my outrage
Editor’s Note: This piece was written April 17.

My soul today is like the rain, heavy and cold. Walking across the windy and wet U-Maine campus, shaking off my black Gore-Tex jacket bought just in time for the rainy season, settling into my desk chosen for its prime spot facing the window on the first floor of the large science building, turning on my laptop, beginning to grade lab reports, trying to accomplish the tasks of the everyday, I pause, I sigh.

I am overcome.

I drink more coffee. I check my e-mail. I stare out the window at the brownness, and grayness. This feeling will not pass. I am overcome with the world’s sorrows. Overcome with everyone’s normalcy. Overcome with our ability to turn a blind-eye and live as if there is no war, as if a killing rampage did not happen a short 24 hours prior on a college campus like this one, beautiful, rural and safe.

We all act as if we are not responsible, as if we did not put the people in power that started war, as if we do not continue to send our young and strong to their deaths in the desert, as if we did not put the guns in the killer’s hands. How did we become a nation so desensitized? When did we stop feeling? When did we stop taking responsibility for our actions? How is it not our fault? If we took responsibility, could we mobilize to create change?

Through everything that has happened in the past five years; through the killing of our young in what should be sanctuaries of growing and learning; through the horse-drawn buggy or American flag-lined processions of their funerals; through a vaguely understood and increasingly bloody war; through the constant destruction of the planet’s natural wondersthrough it all we continue to be normal.

We brush our teeth, we drink our coffee, we go to work, we buy groceries, we throw out plastic bags, we watch television and we sleep in our comfortable beds in our warm homes. We let ourselves be consumed by our tiny little worlds and lose sight of the unseen world around us.

I understand the need for normalcy. Without it, many of us would not be able to get out of bed each morning. I understand the need to continue with the everyday.

I do not understand our inaction.

I do not understand gun laws any more than I understand plastic bags. I do not understand our lack of outrage. I do not understand my own lack of outrage – where is my anger? Where is my passion to speak truth to power?

I do not know how to make myself analyze the data for my little master’s thesis at my little desk in my rainy little corner of the world on this short sorrow-filled day. How can I justify my comfortable life when the world is unraveling? How do I channel my sorrow for those I have never met on a college campus, and in a desert I have never seen? How do I grade a stack of lab reports as if it matters if students understand enzyme action?

I do not know how to mobilize a nation to wake up, and pay attention. I do not know how to act when the heaviness of my heart slows me down. When April showers finally cease and May flowers fill the crisp Maine air, maybe, just maybe, the bears and the squirrels will not be the only ones to rub the sleep from their eyes.

Maybe the people of our nation will do the same.

Anna Bullett, a native of Auburn, is a graduate student working on a master’s degree in food science and human nutrition at the University of Maine. She lives in Brewer.