One of the first things I do every morning is turn on WNYC radio. While making my daughter’s jelly sandwich lunch or pouring my son’s Lucky Charms into a bowl, I listen to yesterday’s body count in Iraq or news of another car bomb attack.

These tragic reports are background to the foreground of my life in Park Slope. While getting my kids out of bed, dressed, and ready for school, the world comes into the kitchen through the radio.

Intermixed with the nagging, the cajoling, the "get your socks on please," I hear about lives cut short by war and unfathomable destruction. These casualities represent real people  just like us: people who had hopes and dreams for their children and themselves.

Often, the radio feels like a downer – a dark juxtaposition to my daughter’s quest for the perfect outfit, my son’s search for his eyeglasses.

I know people who won’t listen to the news anymore because "it depresses them." But I believe it’s important to stay connected, despite, or perhaps because of, the sadness it evokes. I don’t want to cocoon myself and be oblivious to the horrors that exist even if I feel helpless in the face of them. It’s a split-screen life — the pleasure of our walk down Third Street to school, my daughter’s hand in mine — and the pain and destruction far away. Elsewhere.

It’s a split-screen life.