Coming of Age In Terrorist Times

WASHINGTON -- "Mommy, what did the news used to be about before it was about terrorism?"

That was my younger daughter, snuggling in bed a few weeks after 9/11. She was then 4, and, granted, there was probably more consumption of news in our home than was healthy.

Fourteen years later, that toddler is a college freshman, too cool to snuggle and too far away even if she were so inclined. But her question remains sadly relevant.

"It's really scary to grow up in a time when mass killings happen this often," she texted Wednesday afternoon, as the latest active shooting situation was still unfolding.

And, knowing her mom, "Are you gonna write about it?"

What, I asked, should I say? "Maybe how when things like this happen so frequently it desensitizes people to violence," she texted. "My friend came into my room and I was watching the news and they were showing footage from what happened today. And she just looks at the TV and goes, 'It's hard to be sad about stuff like this when it happens every other week.'''

If only the carnage were that infrequent.

Indeed, her older sister checked in Thursday morning from London, where she is concluding a semester abroad, quoting The New Yorker: "Week by week, or recently, hour by hour, we tally the carnage." How happy am I to have a New Yorker-reading child; how terrible that this is what she reads.

The columnist's instinct is to examine an issue and propose solutions -- if not perfect fixes, at least half-measures. And so, in response to mass shootings, I have written about tightening background checks and limiting magazine sizes; about cracking down on domestic abusers and requiring trigger locks.

Today, I find myself suggestion-free, just sad. Despairing might not be too strong a word. My daughter's friend notwithstanding, I don't think we are desensitized by this killing. We are depressed -- by its omnipresence, by its persistence, by its multiplicity of sources, whether right-wing extremists, disaffected high school students, or, yes, from Islamist terrorists, home-grown and overseas.

And by the seeming insistence of our political system on repelling even the slightest changes in the direction of sanity. "We should never think that this is something that just happens in the ordinary course of events, because it doesn't happen with the same frequency in other countries," President Obama cautioned, once again. True, yet I despair, that word again, of the possibility of dislodging the legislative gridlock.

Every such episode is terrible, in its own way -- innocent children at Sandy Hook, innocent movie patrons in Aurora, innocent churchgoers in Charleston. Still, something about San Bernardino feels especially disturbing and ominous. Partly it is the rapid, seemingly incessant pileup of shootings. Another? Already?

Even more, it is that this one seems like such an unsettling hybrid, a ghoulish mashup of workplace violence and possible Islamist terror. So far, it falls outside the comfortable compartments into which we fit these episodes to try to make sense of the senseless.

These were killers with an arsenaland a baby registry at Target. They dropped off the infant with grandma, claiming the mundane excuse of a doctors appointment. If workplace violence, they murdered colleagues who had hosted a baby shower. If Islamist extremism, they shouted no religious slogans. Â If Tashfeen Malik pledged fealty to ISIS, Syed Farook was a college graduate, a tinkerer with vintage cars, devout yet seemingly integrated into modern society. Â That he was not an obvious candidate for radicalization makes that possibility all the more alarming.

To live is to accept some measure of risk; otherwise we would not venture outside a sanitary bubble. When my daughters express anxiety about a terror attack, I wave it off and tell them they should fear driving on the Beltway instead.

But I find myself wondering these days: Which do I worry about more? The child on a college campus when the National Rifle Association is lobbying to allow more weapons there? The one traveling overseas, from European capital to European capital? Or either one at home, driving that Beltway? The parent's plight, of course, is to be ever aware of these hazards, and more.

My children's consciousness of current affairs dawned on 9/11. They heard the mommies debate Anthrax precautions on the playground. They were kept indoors, soccer seasons ruined, when two snipers terrorized our region a year later.

Now they are nearly grown, too old to shield from bad news, too young to have lived through so much of it. And so the question evolves: Not what do we tell our children, but what will they be telling theirs?

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Ruth Marcus' email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.