The sun is bouncing all around my living room and hallway this morning. Yellow, pink, purple and orange. My coffee is poured and in my new gray mug that I procured at an open studio on Saturday. I sit at my computer table and light a candle. From the ordinary to the sacred. I wait at the blank page for what might show up. I know what keeps showing up but I quash it. Undeterred it rises from the ashes. I stuff it down again but it rises to the top like curdled cream in a cup of black tea. Guns. Violence. Mass Murders. Children Unsafe at School. Families Unsafe at the Mall, in the Grocery Store, at Church, Ordinary Citizens Gunned Down in Movie Theatres, Dance Classes, Night Clubs… and after 9 human beings were killed in Texas, a state that is doing away with permits to carry handguns and lowering the age of legal gun carriers to 18.
In the New York Times today, I read this – Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, attended a vigil for the victims of the shooting at the shopping center, Allen Premium Outlets, but said earlier that there would be no new effort by his administration to limit access to firearms — because it would not work.
“We’ve seen an increased number of shootings in states with easy gun laws as well as shootings in states with very strict gun laws,” Mr. Abbott said in an interview on Fox News. He said Texas was responding to the “dramatic increase in the amount of anger” across the United States by going to “its root cause, which is addressing the mental health problems behind it.”
Texas has one of the worst records in the country for properly addressing mental health challenges. And all the other politicians who say after every horror that this not a time of politics but we must focus on the victims. It is a time for politics. It is beyond time for politics.
When what we need to write comes to us and we brush it aside, the writing that we do in its place is stilted and uninteresting. Write what you are called to write.
Meaningful Monday Writing Prompt ~ Write about a time you censored yourself when you really wanted to speak out. Why did you – what was your reason for doing so? And what was the outcome?