Please sit down. And if you’d be so kind, grab your friends joining you tomorrow at some gun lobby fete and encourage them to do the same. Just.sit.down.
My granddaughters got home from school yesterday. They hugged their parents, perhaps ran outside to play or grabbed a snack or just engaged in 6 and 7 year old silliness that increases exponentially as the end of the school year approaches. They fuel the air I breathe, their day-to-days inform my narrative as their Gigi.
There are families experiencing a pain that is unfathomably deep and permanent. Forever reconfigured, forever defined by one who is missing. And if you haven’t had enough of this horror, this talent that we have in the United States to be the best at killing each other for no damn reason, then perhaps you shouldn’t read this.
I am not against the Second Amendment, but when I heard the Senator start talking about the radical Democrats who want to limit the rights it accords and arguing for more security measures at elementary schools, I bowed my head and sobbed. This is the best you’ve got? How about acknowledging that if you’re the literal constitutionalist that you pride yourself to be, you recall that when written, the Second Amendment was talking about muskets. A minute to load, one shot, reload. No AR-15s, long rifles, armaments designed for war available to anyone.
I don’t want to bow my head in moments of silence, whisper prayers of healing for broken hearts, shake my head in disbelief that we can’t even get a damn reference check bill passed, despite over 80% of the population supporting it. I don’t understand why we feel it is enough to extend sympathies and not do anything past the flippant.
My little girls will burst into their homes this afternoon. They’ll have news and wonder and giggles and fits and hugs and breathlessness. Their parents will hold them and tickle them with kisses and at night, cuddle them and smell that delicious-after-bath-smell that only little ones have. And they’ll whisper ‘I love you’ as they turn out the light.
To thank G-d for allowing your child to arrive safely at home from school each day, is unimaginable to me – and yet, here I am, overwhelmed with sorrow and an almost superstitious need to repeat ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’.
Waiting for the Karma Truck 