The Emptiness Of Every Tomorrow

There's a terrible darkness that's taken hold of a majority of our nation's leaders. It's a void where ineptitude, ignorance, and greed run wild, and where evil masquerades as moral and just.

This void is uniquely American, and its deadly consequences were visited upon a cheerfully decorated American classroom where children were blanketed with bullets, leaving carnage behind. Again.

The teenager who calmly walked into Silver Rail Elementary School with his long gun and started shooting was himself a child just 5 years ago. What made him think this was okay? What drove him into madness? What failed to stop his worst impulses?

We may never know. But that's beside the point.

The Republican Party has beaten its drum long and hard over the need to protect our children from the “scourge” of transgenders, waving the red, white, and blue, and winning elections by projecting an imagined “superior morality”. And yet, it refuses to raise its voice against the common practice of putting guns into the hands of teenagers whose brains are not yet fully formed, whose values are not fully shaped, whose temperament is not yet managed, and who can so easily commit mass murder.

We can no longer call this a stable or functioning society when our leaders care more about gender designation than gun registration—or who care more about the unborn than those who were born and are now seated in classrooms.

Any one of us may lose a child we dearly love to gun violence these days. Because this is who we've allowed ourselves to become. It's a given, but only because we tolerate it as a given.

We don't have to accept this madness any longer, because we know killing children is not the norm in other societies. It is uniquely American.

Should nothing change, should we continue to put guns into the eager hands of little boys or big boys, then we will have to bear the burden of losing someone we adore. We will have to accept the emptiness of every tomorrow when our loved one is shot in the face, or head, or multiple times, depending on how much evil is visited upon their classroom on that calamitous day.