With The Permission Of The Ignorant

"It was the meanest moment of eternity."

~Zora Fuller Ross, Independence!


It's Sunday. I am sure of that. I have been talking to God quite a bit in the last couple days, barely able to put my feelings into understandable thoughts. Thank God, God knows me and understands me before I even begin. Horrible things happen every single day. Awful obscene things. They happen to the elderly, and the babies. They happen to the rich and the poor. Awful moments know nothing of race or religion. The hour and day makes no difference to the turning of the world. No one who wakes up in the morning, knows if they will have the distinct joy of seeing an amazing sunset as the day slips into night. And just as I was sharing with my friend Paul the other day, life is pretty darned random, but yet when you least expect it, a pattern will occur to once again remind you that sometimes things happen specifically in some scheduled universe we mortals are not necessarily privy to, and sometimes we do know it's coming and we ignorantly choose to ignore it.

In my life I have been guilty of relying on the random to explain away responsibility. It wasn't my fault that I got a flat, who could have known that if I hit that pot hole, it would leave my tire damaged. The pothole was perfectly random, but the knowledge that there was at least a small chance of hitting one, rather than paying attention to traffic hazards, was somehow pushed to the back of my mind as just one more of God's little jests in a random universe. God had nothing to do with it. If God does indeed have a sense of humor, he wouldn't have used it to flatten my tire. He would have used it to help me find a random banana skin to slip on. Which let's face it... is not only hilarious, but makes a good use of all parts of a delicious fruit.

The shooting that happened on Friday... :::weep::: seems in some ways to be a random act of a sick mind, when in fact, I think we all know, it was as far from random as anything gets. The Aurora Colorado shooting last summer could be explained as a random act of a dangerous mind, as could the mall shooting a week ago in Washington, as could the shooting at Virginia Tech, and Columbine, and the Luby's massacre, and the shooting of Gabby Giffords, 1 California Street, and just Saturday evening a man was arrested in Southern California for shooting more than 50 rounds into a parking lot near Macy's at the Fashion Island Mall in Newport Beach, and the murder/suicide in Las Vegas yesterday, the football player who killed the mother of his infant daughter and then himself. All random acts of the deranged. The psychotic. The evil. The mentally disturbed. The sick.

Actually, each and every time someone is murdered with a gun, either as part of a mass shooting, or suicide by one's own hand, the responsibility lies not just with the one holding the gun, as they couldn't have done it without the permission of the ignorant.

As our president wept yesterday on live TV, I felt nothing but disgust at his inaction on gun control. That is one of the reasons I can very close to not voting last November. As he spoke of the shooting in Connecticut, I couldn't feel sorry for him, I was too busy grieving for the children and teachers who did nothing wrong. They were innocent. But they paid for the selfishness of those too worried about their own self-serving agenda. "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." "If you take all the guns off the street than only the criminals will have guns." "It's my right under the 2nd Amendment." BLAH... BLAH... BLAH. The ridiculous justifications make me sick. Physically sick. Twice yesterday. Once today.

How many more children?

I don't know. I hope I don't find out. But I am fairly sure... someday... it will happen again. Especially if we Americans continue to live in the fantasy that we are the best country on the planet. That we can do no wrong as a society. That the world wants to be just like us.

No They Don't.

Want a wake-up call?

Yesterday, some Pakistani school children held a prayer vigil for the victims of the shooting in Connecticut.

I am proud to say that I live in the state with the toughest gun laws in the country, but it didn't come about without the tragic loss of life. Too many lives.

Will anything change?

Not without the permission of the ignorant. Sleep well tonight, knowing your life is, for now, in their hands.

Please visit the Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence to leave a message of condolence and learn the facts.

~Me