How could that happen?

So often I hear about unfair, horrific, and heartbreaking stories around the world, and I think to myself, “How was that allowed to happen?”

I remember when the story surfaced of the remains of almost 800 children being found at the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Galway, Ireland.  How could that happen?

When I read the history on what happened at Black Wall Street in Tulsa 100 years ago this week, and the countless people who were murdered and have never been accounted for.  How could that happen?

And when I heard about the remains of 215 Indigenous children, some as young as three, found at a residential school in Canada that only closed in 1978.  How could that happen?

But it did.  And now that we know about it, we can’t un-know it.  So what can we do?

We can read and learn and share what we find out.  We can donate to a cause that is affiliated with these tragedies to try and support those who are hurting.  We can talk to our children, ask questions, contact our government officials.  We can use our voices to say this should never have happened and it should never happen again.

Payam Akhavan, Canadian Human Rights Lawyer, said, “Suffering is not some big idea in the sky.  It is a lived experience, a profound knowledge, scattered across the many sites of sorrow that I have witnessed.  Feeling injustice is the only means of understanding justice: stories, both enchanting and heartbreaking, are the only means of knowing why our dignity matters.  This then is a story among stories, a glimpse of our shared longing to redeem irredeemable loss, a tale of how wounds open us to search in darkness for the dawn of a better world.”

Will we continue to search the darkness for that dawn?