Time

It is too hard to talk about what happened on Friday in Newtown, Connecticut. It’s too painful, too unbearable. It doesn’t seem real, and it will never make sense. It’s too much to bear. What we must talk about is what we can do to make unthinkable events never happen again.

This is the time when we need to come together and do something. It is the time when we need to talk about gun control, about how we deal with mental illness in this country, about overexposure to violence in the media, movies, video games, and we need to look at ourselves and how we disconnect from one another and choose isolation instead of community. Community is healing and protective, and many of us don’t have that support. Mass violence is not an accident and it is not caused by “pure evil.” It is caused by people and their circumstances. And there is something we can do about it.

We have no more time to wait. This is when we need deal with gun control issues, with mental illness treatment and support, and with changing our culture of violence and isolation. It’s when we need to stop arguing with each other and act in every direction we can think of until we start to feel safer again. Until our babies are safe. Until we feel like this world of ours is not pure evil.