5:55 pm – 3 Apr. 2018. I opened my front door this evening after a long work day, and immediately realized I had left my TV on. I heard the voices of exasperated and breathless TV anchors describing another mass shooting in America, and God help me, I shrugged my shoulders. I have reached the point where mass murder and attempted murder is no longer shocking. I did raise an eyebrow when I heard the shooter, who enacted the crime on the YOUTUBE campus in San Bruno, California, was a woman in her 30’s. Mass shootings have become so commonplace in America that we are reduced to immediately looking for story angles. Was he or she a Muslim or White Nationalists, were the victims the aftermath of a hate crime or terror? Were they school kids or attending church or in a movie theater? Where and when does it stop?
These repeated episodes of violence have made me cynical and jaded. I sat down with my hands folded in front of me and waited for the first tweet from President Trump. I said out loud, alone in my living room, “he [Trump] is waiting until he hears if the shooter’s surname is Ortiz or Ali.” In the past, my mind would immediately think of the victims’ families. I would feel for the husbands, wives, and children. I would wonder if moms and dads were biting their lips with their hands prayerfully perched in front of their faces hoping for good news.
6:49 pm- 3 Apr. 2018. I just checked my twitter feed and with still no foil to place blame, Donald Trump decided to placate the NRA by sending, ‘thoughts and prayers…’ This phrase has now become a finger waving idiom, used by Republicans to stick a finger in the eye of liberals. The families of the victims of Newtown, Ct. and just recently the victims of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have derided the use of the phrase for the empty gesture it has always been. Some Republicans have tried on new mocking shoes, Rick Santorum suggested that teens learn CPR as an answer to gun violence. Fox News host Laura Ingraham did all but poke her tongue out and wag her fingers with her thumbs in her ears at high schooler David Hogg because he was not accepted by UCLA. The chief Deplorable, Ted Nugent, who reportedly soiled his pants to avoid military service and wrote a song about raping a thirteen-year-old girl, called the kids who survived the Douglas massacre “soulless.”
Santorum has since tried to recant his statement. Ingraham took a long Easter “vacation” and Ted Nugent, well he is Ted Nugent. I must get from under this de-civilization of America being led by cranks, kooks and malicious misanthropes. I want to see and identify the hearts of the victims and not the soulless (thanks Ted) purveyors of guns and greed.
Donald Trump during the presidential campaign feigned his knowledge of the Bible to gain the favor of evangelicals. He sounded as if he was the comedic lounge act at a seedy bar, recalling the “Two Corinthians.” Maybe Mr. Trump can learn something if he would read, and sincerely speak to the families and not the ideology.
“For I wrote you out of great distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to grieve you but to let you know the depth of my love for you” -2 Corinthians, 2:4
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