NEXT

Why bother to pick up and fold your clothes in the morning? 

Why pay that parking ticket? 

Why bother to see if the milk has expired? 

Really, who cares?

It all turns to dust in your mouth anyway. The latest horror show is here. The next one is coming. You know it. And you want to look away from this one — please, please do not make me see the faces of the latest children lost in the new mass shooting on Monday. But there it is. Someone’s family was destroyed in an instant by a lightning bolt in an AR-15. In Nashville, this time. 

And it hasn’t happened to you but it could have. And even if you don’t know anyone in that particular community — it doesn’t matter. Because a mother knows the pain of another mother. A brother knows the loss of someone’s brother or sister. And even in the outrage and sadness, you also know the guilt of the secret relief that it isn’t your town, your school, your church, your synagogue. Not this time.  

But really — “it’s just a matter of time,” said Ashbey Beasley, a woman visiting Tennessee with her family who showed up in front of the bank of news cameras. She survived a different mass shooting last year and happened to be in Nashville — on vacation! She erupted: “I have been lobbying in D.C. since we survived a mass shooting in July. I have visited with 130 lawmakers … these mass shootings will continue to happen until our lawmakers step up and pass gun safety legislation.”

Put all your joy away. We don’t deserve it. We adults who have allowed this putrid reality to become the quotidian for our country. We who make the rules, set the stakes and impose the price — we preside over a lawless and immoral status quo.

As a society, it is immoral to place the sanctity of guns above the lives of children. It’s been more than 10 years since the Sandy Hook shooting, where we watched 26 people — including 20 children aged 6 and 7 — perish, and did nothing.

Such a world we’ve created, without a floor. Where the ground is never firm under your feet and it all slips out from under you in a moment because a child — not your child, someone else’s child — has been violently, bestially, outrageously ripped from the world of the living. 

We live the trauma again and again and again. 

We fail our children. Our government fails us. 

Chaos wins. Insanity prevails.

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