When something happens like 19 people are shot and killed, again, innocent, loving, living individual people who all had lives and hopes and friends and family and a path in this world, as everyone should, that was never meant for annihilation while shopping or going to church or to the movies or to school, we all die a little death. We belong to them and they belong to us and so we live together and we die together. We are not as separate as it would be convenient to be. We have a responsibility for each other, which is why we feel it, why we should feel it, when one of us dies a death that wasn’t meant to be. A death, that maybe if we grabbed a hold of that current that binds us and found the voice to speak to it, we could demand together that we need to care more, love more, shout louder, stand stronger in the name of the freedom to live a day as we intended to live it, in peace and safe from a well fed and hate fueled fire of bullets.
It is not war we need to fight. Revenge will not lift us from this. It is raging anger worn as a coat over an abyss of fear that drives and accepts this horror show.
It is love that we have to figure our way to. Don’t be fooled. There is no weakness in coming to the conclusion of love. Love takes more courage, knowledge, and action than any war ever fought.
In war you fight to the death. In love, you have to keep going, keep growing and keep living.
Love with everything you have got. Make it contagious. Do everything you can to keep us together. All of us.
Feed people.