This morning, as I passed through Herald Square on my walk to work, I saw a discarded copy of a daily paper smudged onto the sidewalk, sprawled open, with a gigantic picture Alison Parker’s face emblazoned across a crinkled page. It was so big that I could see it from halfway down the block. People carried on with their days, stepping on it and around it as they would with any piece of Manhattan litter. I’ll bet that when she woke up for work yesterday, she never in a million years imagined that in a few short hours she’d be world famous, and in the worst of ways. That her 24-year-old everyday life in Virginia would be smeared across headlines and newspapers all over New York City. That people would obliviously step over the image of her face on the ground as they commuted to work, because that’s what it means to be so deeply embedded in a national tragedy - it means that by the time her face made it onto the sidewalk, just over 24 hours after she’d died, any person in America who’d been exposed to a TV or computer screen within the past day for more than a few seconds had already memorized every facet of her expression, her appearance, her life, and it was already old news to them. Because that’s what happens when you live in a country where these kinds of brutal, archaic acts of violence are a near-frequent occurrence. Life is absurd and it is short and I don’t really know what to do with that reality besides to honor and learn from the best qualities of those who are gone and to frantically, manically, try to make this world better than it was when they left and to make life richer and to do and see and accomplish more, more, more before time runs out.
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