Yesterday, like many others, we woke up heartbroken.
By now, all of us know of the tragedy that transpired yesterday—a man made the decision to drive an hour and 45 minutes to a prominent gay club in Orlando on Pride Weekend to kill as many people as he could. He sadly accomplished that task.
Even writing about this I feel conflicted, giving more exposure and voice to this far-too-widespread, vitriolic hatred of The Other that exists in the world today, especially in our own, very flawed country.
Yet I feel that I can’t write anything today without talking about this tragedy.
And so I’ll simply write this:
From what we know now—and, granted, that may well change any second now—the suspect’s father told reporters that his son was angry after seeing two men kissing.
Fine.
Be angry. Whether I condone your anger or not, anyone out there is welcome to be angry at two men, two women, a man and a woman, a black man and a white woman, who-the-fuck-ever doing what-the-fuck-ever together. Be-the-fuck-angry.
Just don’t gun us down. Just don’t end 50 lives or 20 lives or one life because you don’t like what’s going on—because it’s not what you believe in.
Those are lives.
Lives.
Not voiced differences of opinion—lifetimes of voiced differences of opinion, lifetimes of progress and lack-of-progress and who-the-fuck-cares because we’re not the judges of how people live their lives and never should be, so long as they don’t walk into a building and gun down scores of people they never knew and likely never would have killed—never—if they had taken the time and had the courage to stop and talk with any one of them.
I know stricter gun laws would help by making it harder for people to kill other people, but at the end of the day, I just wish we all had better ways to deal with anger and disagreement and lack of understanding each other than this.
We’re out of words; we just hurt.
Please, peace.
