If you believe in God, don’t you think God is pretty sick of us by now?
Time and again we prove to the rest of the world that the one thing Americans worship most — the true supreme being in this country — is the gun.
And so when the latest mass shooting happens, as we knew it would, the feckless suits who make our laws turn to God for thoughts and prayers.
As if we were helpless to do anything else. As if somehow we couldn’t protect the rights of hunters, or people who feel they need a gun for protection, without allowing private arsenals. As if the price of our citizenship is that a teenager in Uvalde, Texas, can murder 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school.
There are troubled teenagers everywhere. There is mental illness and poverty all over the world. But only in America do we make it so legally easy for the angry and aggrieved to hold death in their hands.
If you believe in God, you have to believe God gave us the common sense to know that an 18-year-old shouldn’t be able to walk into a gun store and walk out with an assault rifle.
You have to believe God gave us the wisdom to know that the Founding Fathers never anticipated or intended that “a well-regulated militia” would mean people walking around Walmart strapped and holstered.
You have to believe God gave us the morality to understand that continuing to take the gun lobby’s money, in the middle of this rolling national massacre, leaves a stain that will never wash out.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence keeps track of how much money senators take from the National Rifle Association. North Carolina’s senators rank no. 2 and no. 4 on the list. Richard Burr, who’s leaving office after this year, has taken almost $7 million from the NRA in his career. Thom Tillis has taken more than $4 million. They should be ashamed and our state should be ashamed of them.
Today is Memorial Day, a day we pause to honor the men and women who have died while serving in our military.
I’m thinking that we now need a second memorial day, one to remember all the souls lost to all our mass shootings, the casualties of our internal war.
Put the names of the children from Uvalde in granite. Put the faces from Sandy Hook on a memorial. Read the list of the dead out loud, the ones from Buffalo and Parkland and El Paso and Charleston.
They are the sacrifices we make to the cold steel god this country has created — a god that does not care about thoughts and prayers.
So if you believe in the other God, the God of love and mercy, what do you think that God thinks of us?
A friend of mine quoted a Mary Oliver poem on Twitter the other day. The poem is just two lines:
That God had a plan, I do not doubt.
But what if His plan was, that we would do better?
