A few days before my son, Bodhi, was born, a man entered a nightclub in Orlando and extinguished forty-nine lives. I shut down. I couldn’t bear to hear about another shooting, another bombing, another death. I suffocated. I was going to be a father, and the thought of my son coming into this world of violence and hate shook me to the core. But he came. And he was beautiful.
This is our world, this mix of tragedy and joy.
When I look at my son, I see possibility. I see a future. It is bright. And it is dark. I can’t shield him from this. The American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote to his son, “I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.” I want the same for Bodhi.
There is nothing we can do to stave off pain. It will come. But how we handle ourselves in the aftermath is a truer definition of who we are as citizens. Awareness. Open-mindedness. I want my boy to believe in possibility. To hope. To strive for something better.
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