Sorry for the gap in writing, but we’ve had a dozen different projects that have taken all the time away from artistic endeavors. I must strive to make time for my art.

I’ve also been pondering. Like most of us, I’ll assume, I have struggled with how to talk about the deaths of so many young children in Texas during the Guadaloupe River floods.

We have seven nieces, nephews and god children of child-rearing age who have a collective dozen children, most of whom are under the age of 10. I know without a doubt in my soul that each one of those parents would lay down their life for one of their children, so I cannot possibly imagine the type of anguish the parents of all these lost children are going through, not to mention their extended family circles and their communities.

Over dinner the day or two after the flood, I tried to draw a line between Sandy Hook and Camp Mystic, but ran into some vehement disagreement that these two things are associated. My good friend argued that one was an Act of God, the other an Act of Humanity. But I have thought a lot about these things and think that I disagree — I think these are both “Acts of God” if you will, in that neither of them are things that we can reasonably plan against although both were situations that we can reasonably expect our children to be safe within.

We are no longer in the wild, wild west. Very few of us are pioneers and even fewer of us “take our lives into our own hands” when we venture out hiking in the back country, climbing a mountain, sky diving, scuba diving, speeding and other activities where we can have a reasonable expectation of risk to life. We understand the difference.

But when parents send their kids to school, on a bus, to hockey or soccer practice, to a friend’s birthday party or off to summer camp, I think we all share a “reasonable expectation of safety.” That comes from a combination of Trust Factors, including familiarity with the bus driver, the town in which we live, trust that our kids can make decent decisions on their own, trust that schools and camps and activity organizers all provide Trusted Adult oversight and safety protocols, and we also trust that the government to which we pay our taxes provides a safety net in the form of highway patrols, police and fire, and emergency management.

The government – local, state and federal – also establishes guidelines in the form of laws and policies to help support that reasonable expectation of safety. That’s why we have building codes, and highway departments, and a whole web of laws and policies intended (a risky word here) to help keep us all safe together as a community, as “leadership” has always promised and, for the most part, done.

So when that reasonable expectation fails us in such an unfathomable way – through the deaths of the most defenseless among us – those for whom we believe we are responsible, what do we do to try and lessen the likelihood that this could ever happen again? Because isn’t that the point of society and government, of civilization – to help us build protections from things that cause us harm and loss?

I think that’s all at the moment. I’m just trying to comprehend the horrific sense of loss and what type of actions we can all collectively agree need to be taken to not let this happen to another single life.

I have what I think are reasonable expectations of safety for me, my family and my fellow humans.