Endgame

Eighteen, at last count. Eighteen children lie murdered today. It is horrifying. Beyond sad. Infuriating. Another school shooting. And just writing that sentence is beyond my comprehension. I was a young teen when Columbine happened. Now school shootings occur with disarming regularity. Our terror at the unimaginable has shifted into numbness at the mundane routine mess of it all.

I am beyond asking when it will stop. It didn’t stop after Columbine. It didn’t stop after Sandy Hook. It won’t stop after Uvalde.

I’ve been trying to make sense of it. For the longest time I couldn’t bring myself to do anything but shake with rage. Then I just needed escape from this reality. I am watching a super hero movie. I wanted something in which the good people lost everything and the bad guys won, and then the good guys beat them and it ends happily. But the strange thing is that the Avengers don’t win. They avenge. They can’t stop the bad things from happening. But they do the right thing, the hard thing, in spite of losing it all. Maybe I can, too?

It is a shallow lesson and an inadequate response to an unthinkable tragedy that is sadly all too easily imagined. But it is all I have right now, so I will hold on to it for what it is: pop psychology based on pop culture. But the stories we tell each other are powerful. They aren’t fact, but they can so often be true. Truth emanates from human experience, and we reflect human experience by telling each other stories. It is an experience as old as humanity.

But if that is to bring solace, it is small, and not enough. Eighteen children should be alive to love the Avengers’s stories with me. To grow up and love running in the green grass beneath the yellow sun. To be safe at school, or church, or the grocer, or the public square. But they are not here anymore. What truly haunts me about all this is how it never should have happened. I could insert a bunch of buzzwords and get “political” but that’s been said before, and in America, it is well known what should happen, who should make it happen, and in the end, what should never happen again.

Maybe like a magician, we have given away the key to the universe of time, and now simply have to watch the devastation unfold time and time again until enough people have died, and then we get a miraculous second chance to bring back the dead. But no, I must be once again confusing reality with with what my soul wants so badly. Space monsters and power villains are no match for the truth. Evil doesn’t need to be purple, or red, or larger than life. It just needs a gun and an opportunity. Taking the gun away will prevent the opportunity from finding percussive voice. Sure, bad people will still find ways to hurt good people, but we shouldn’t be making it easy, damn it!

I just want every single person to grow up without fearing for their lives, fearing because someone full of rage has a gun and can use it freely, carry it openly, and put a bullet in our loved one’s fragile bodies. I don’t blame the guns, but oh, they make it so much easier. The wizard knew the endgame of his story. I don’t know the endgame to mine, to our shared story, our shared existence in this country. But I know one step I can take to work towards the future where America is free from the constant barrage of gun violence. I will take that step as often as I can.

If it means losing friends, losing the love of family, or endangering a comfortable life, then so be it. Some things are worth fighting for, and by loving peace and all my fellow humans regardless of race, gender, orientation, religion, nationality, or any other puny thing that would seem to divide us, then I can make this world a better place. I will do it in the name of the eighteen children who died today, and all others I have mourned since Columbine. They deserved better, and I will do what I can to make sure those who come after receive better.

I won’t avenge. I can’t. Avenging isn’t what I do. I will love. And I will fight. And by all that is good on this earth, I hope we all win. It is the only thing that will make all this pain worth it, in the end: making a better future by learning from the past. It is the only true way forward. And go forward we must.