Your Dignity Is an Edifying Example: You have been through one of the most unspeakable tragedies the nation has witnessed. You now have an opportunity you neither sought nor could have possibly imagined before terror struck: to forge solidarity with other victims of arbitrary and absurd violence throughout the world. The senseless and gargantuan evil you faced has gripped regions of the globe that war ceaselessly over tribe or political tradition — or God and money and oil and the right to rule or vanquish.

The blood of innocent human beings is spilled in pursuit of ideals whose validity is trumped by the means chosen to obtain them. You are now part of the fellowship of the fractured who can help bring healing to a world addicted to violence — and to the insanely aggrieved who view it as a martyr’s resort.

Your dignity and resolve to march forward in life without bitterness or hate — which proves that you are not the ultimate victims of a madman starved for attention or retribution — can give the world an edifying example of the human spirit determined to overcome the worst that we as a species can offer.

Equally as important, you can link your fate as citizens who suffered in full view of the media to those whose pain and grief are unrecorded and unremarkable because it is routine. You can now find common cause with those nameless and faceless victims of all manner of terror and revenge as they huddle on the corners of their plot of land lacerated by military airstrikes, or in some godforsaken hole in the ground created by guns and bombs.

If you remember them and speak their suffering as though it were your own, you will have transcended your tragedy and taught us all the lesson of our common vulnerability and humanity.