About a half hour ago, as our eight-year-old daughter sat down to eat her dinner, she asked me, “Mom, what does ‘sexy’ mean?” I asked her where she had heard the word. She told me, “From that song, ‘I’m sexy and I know it.'”

I told her it was “a word that grown ups use when then they want to say they feel pretty to somebody else. It’s not a word kids use.”

She moved on to another topic. After they ate, I went online to see what was going on in the world. The NRA apparently would like bullet proof windows in all elementary school classrooms. Perfect.

And then there’s this:

Precocious Fifth Grade Psychopaths Conspire to Rape And Murder Female Classmate.

Two fifth grade boys, aged 10 and 11, have been ruled competent to stand trial in juvenile court for conspiring to rape and kill their female classmate, and possibly murder other students as well. They were arrested after a classmate saw them playing with a knife on the school bus and reported it to a teacher.

I should. I really should stop. This kind of story kills me, slowly, from the inside out.

But the more I know, the less I will take for granted. It’s the only bright side. Dim, but bright enough.