It’s approximately 5:30pm eastern time on a Thursday, so inherently my instincts gravitate to my television remote to flip on the nightly news.
To start out, I turned on my local news channel, and immediately a live “breaking news” banner dances across the bottom of the screen, while footage of a hospital from different angles streams throughout the rest of the picture. Focusing my eyes on the title of the story before tuning my ears in, I saw ‘Pennsylvania Hospital shooting leaves 1 dead, 2 injured.’
Woah. Wait, a hospital? But, that’s where people go to seek dire medical help for situations like these.
I listened carefully while simultaneously Googling (naturally) the headline on my iPhone, and began filling in details of what exactly happened. This afternoon in Darby, PA, a shooting occurred at the Mercy Wellness Center, which is across the street from Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital. While the motives remain unclear, it was said that the shooter invaded the 3rd floor of the center and opened fire. Police believe that there was gunfire exchanged between a doctor and the shooter.
With chills sent up my spine, I confusingly flipped over to CNN to soak up some international news. This action panned out in a strikingly and uncomfortably familiar manner. Staring at my television screen, I see yet another breaking news banner. This time, the white letters in the alarming red bar at the bottom of the picture read, ’16 killed at UN shelter in Gaza.’
Pause. A United Nations Center? But, this UN Center was a humanitarian effort to provide on-the-fly shelter for helpless families in Gaza…this was ultimately a hospital.
Let us take a moment to analyze these two strikingly homogeneous stories. In both we see places of shelter being terrorized: one being on the local level, while the other on an international scale. It is obvious that tragedy and terrorism sadly have no boundaries. At the same time, the fact that I was able to turn on the news for not even 5 minutes to see essentially two hospitals being violently blindsided is what churns my stomach to new levels. Moreover, the fact that this type of action is occurring at the same time on two separate faces of the planet frightens and confuses me.
A hospital or medical center is a place where, as humans, we turn for guidance in the most dire of situations. It is a common ground for friend and foe, victim and perpetrator, rich and poor, young and old. How can any of us have a safe place to go when the terror that so prominently shows its face in the world has no boundaries?
These are the questions that are currently begging inside of me:
Why do I feel like with each passing day, the lines, levels, and limits of violence are both tested and broken?
What is it that drives the ever-so-deeply engrained hatred and rage in us as a species?
Where will we go when there is no longer shelter in even the places designed to stipulate just that? I feel it is most appropriate for me to end this post with these open-ended questions, for only we as a human race have the ability to seek refuge in these answers.