We sat behind a family at the Billy Joel concert. Mom, dad, older sister, her husband, younger sister, her bestie, son, girlfriend. The girls, at least, had clearly grown up listening to their parents' Billy Joel albums, because they kept getting each other's attention and doing dance moves choreographed sometime between size 6x and the juniors section.

I loved watching them. Also, they were almost the youngest people there. Beloved and I, at 41, were bringing down the average age of the crowd in our section all by ourselves, and these glorious children young adults were probably fifteen years younger than we are.

I sat (because you sit when you're old and surrounded by other old people terrified to have another beer lest they have to once again roust the entire row to use the restroom) and thought how nice it must be to be Billy Joel and see your music unite so many generations. Or just to be someone capable of filling stadiums for decades. For DECADES. Props, Billy Joel.

Then he sang a song I'd heard he said he wouldn't ever sing again because he kept forgetting the lyrics: "We Didn't Start the Fire." These are those lyrics:

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide...

Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician Sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can't take it anymore

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on and on and on and on
And on and on and on and on...

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

I watched the younger sister dance in front of me, and I remembered memorizing the lyrics to that song as a teenager. But now, it's us in Afghanistan instead of the Russians. And we still have homeless vets. And boy, terror on the airline went bigger than ever since this song was written. Race relations, um, yeah.

But now it's not me and my generation singing that song. It's my generation doing the stuff.

That twirling twentysomething in front of me is who should be singing the song.

I looked around at the Baby Boomers on either side of me and tried to decide whether to be depressed or hopeful. We didn't light it, but the kids didn't, either.

Will it ever go out?

Though there are many times since I started working for BlogHer I've wished I could look away from Twitter and the news, paying attention to the world is an occupational hazard for me. And I have anxiety disorder and many times intrusive thoughts, which means I find it difficult to stop thinking about the horrible thing that has happened and worrying it will happen again, and then about the people to whom it happened, worrying, worrying into a spiral that leaves me with racing heart and seizing gut, and in those times I find it difficult to model coping skills for my daughter (although, as with Newtown, we've kept the TV off around her and will only talk to her about it if she brings it up, because we prefer to shield her from unnecessary news of this kind). I know I can't change the world we live in, and awareness of all the horror that goes on in the world only gets higher with each posting online. This won't change, and my girl will probably have ten times as much coming at her from all corners of the world by the time she is my age. I need to get the anxiety under control, and I need to teach her how to filter her world the way my mother taught me how to check a garment for holes before buying it. This is our world now.

So here's how you look at this picture.

Image credit: hahatango on Flickr

The runner in the yellow shoes and other spectators on the ground with someone hurt.

The guy holding the small child, taking him away from the scene.

The spectators in the yellow and black jackets leaning over to help.

The guy in jeans who took off his shirt, probably to make a tourniquet.

The police in yellow vests waching over the scene making sure there was no riot.

We can't shut out the world in the window. We have to be aware of our surroundings. But we can hold the right focus on these events. We can look at the majority of people in the picture who just wanted to help.