glassysky

I wrote today on the Ludlow Massacre. Having just churned out 18 inches, I don't care to rehash it, so Wikipedia if you're interested. In any case, regardless of time or place or cause, two women and ten children - some of them tiny babies - died of heat and asphyxiation, crowded together in an earthen pit. Hearing about it today for the first time, I had one of those tearful moments that come on me suddently sometimes in my job and my life. I'm not aware that I guard myself from emotion, that I have some deep well of sympathy I keep under a heavy door. But every now and again, I'll hear about something horrible happening to a child, or to some other innocent, and in a split second I know I have let myself connect too much, and I find myself suppressing a sob, imperfectly. A lot goes on in that split second - among the feelings that pass through my mind, for instance, is a guilt at the suspicion that I am putting on this sob, that I am making myself feel for some dismembered baby when I wouldn't normally. I don't think that particular feeling is accurate, but I always have it, along with a suddenly bottomless sorrow and an enormous sense of loss. Then I emerge from it, cutting off my tears in the way we all learned to do as children, stiff upper lip and all that. There have been times when I've had to walk away for a minute on the job, I get hit so hard. But soon I'm back, and when I'm back it's all forgotten.