Also in your country, you already have terrible things to worry about.

I know. We all do, indeed, have things to worry about. Those little things in our daily life that make us worry, but still somehow we keep going through our day — late for a meeting, miss a doctor’s appointment, let down someone we love. We all have the daily things we worry about.

The massacre in Uvalde was terrifying for me. I could not believe something like this could happen. I could not believe someone is capable of doing something like this. Taking the lives of 19 children and two teachers. Nothing can explain why someone would do that — how someone can do that.

Coming here from Israel, high school shootings were something I only saw in movies, sometimes on the news. But that felt far away, something that would only happen in far-away America, because in Israel, we just have other things to worry about.

In my public high school in northern Israel, we did not have metal detectors or ALICE drills. We had other things to worry about. Bomb drills, terrorists on the streets, war. We all have things to worry about. They might be different, but they are here.

The news about the shooting in Uvalde and the shooting in Buffalo brought me back to the terror wave in Israel this spring, from late March until May, when almost 30 terror attempts took place and 7 deadly terrror attack occured, taking the lives of 19 innocent people.

The sleepless nights worrying that my family and my friends are all safe, jumping from every notification on my phone and every phone call, nervously refreshing the news browser hoping not to see another attack, another victim.

We all have things to worry about, everywhere; they might be different, but in a civilized world, we should not have worried about terror attacks and massacres. On this we can all agree.

No one should worry about going to buy groceries for dinner and facing an active shooter. No one should worry about sending their 10-year-old to school — to learn, explore, spend time with their friends — and be scared of an active shooter taking a child’s life. No one should be worried about walking down the street with their newborn in a stroller and being murdered by a terrorist. We all have things to worry about, but in a better world, or at least one that makes sense sometimes, we would not have to worry about that.

I’m continuing to pray for the families of the victims, for the parents, for anyone whose life has been shaken by the attacks in Uvalde and Buffalo. And continuing to hope for a world where the things we should worry about are getting groceries and getting our kids to school on time, not that those things should be the end.