Time Passes - Nothing Changes

There are so many shootings.  

What is wrong with white men in America today?  Can you imagine if these shooters were women?  Commissions would be empaneled, laws enacted, restrictions placed.  

I try to avoid going down that rabbit hole, but a random Substack post today got me thinking and hurting and ultimately posting a comment about what it's like to experience gun violence on a mass scale in your own town.  

Commenting on gun violence sent me back to my early, post-perforation posts.  From the Before Times, I found that I had plans to be in Chicago, celebrating the birth of a grandchild with a friend from junior high and seeing a play at Steppenwolf.  

I know that I lost the first three days after not bleeding to death on the sidewalk (which I do remember) to morphine and surgical anesthesia in the hospital.  But the fact that I was going on a trip to Chicago is new news to me. I had no idea.  Not about the trip, FAMBB's grandbaby, the tickets I'd somehow managed to secure.    

After almost 15 years, the experience continues to jump up and surprise me. I still haven't met up with FAMBB; another loss to toss on the pile.  

Anyway.......  

I never anticipated that The Burrow would be a big blog.  It was built on friends, and family, and fellow bloggers from the early days (2009) when BlogHer conventions were friendly reunions instead of marketing seminars.  Once I was outed, my readership grew exponentially then dropped off again over time. I replied to a post on Substack recently, and The Burrow had 765 visitors in one day, a gazillion fold increase. 

For those of you who have no idea what I'm typing about, here's the start of my daughter's post on January 9, 2011:

(M)y mom attended the Congress on your Corner event yesterday at her local Safeway. Just as she reached the front of the line to shake Ms. Gifford's hand a gunman appeared and began shooting with an automatic weapon. My mom was shot three times.

That's a sentence I never thought I'd have to type.

There it is, in a nutshell.  A sentence she never thought about was suddenly her all encompassing reality.  That's the piece that people seem to forget.  Gun violence is a Before/After event.  It turns the unimaginable into the here and now.  Safety is no longer blithely assumed to exist.  Caution's the new normal.  

It's also more than a personal event.  It's more than family and friends whose lives are touched.  All of Tucson was traumatized, and that trauma turned into love.  I wasn't the only one to notice it; there was, for a while, kindness in the air.  Even now, when it comes up, people know where they were and how they felt. 

And still, the violence goes on and on and on.  I've been railing about it for more than a decade.  I wrote this about two weeks after I intersected with bullets:

America is not going to get better unless we are all in it together again.  ........ let's do something..... Christina will never be able to fulfill her incredible potential..... it's on us now to do it for her.

Giffords.org  is a good place to start.  Electing responsible humans at all levels of government is even better.  Be sure that guns are safely locked away before you or your children visit someone's home; being brave enough to ask an uncomfortable question comes with the territory these days.  

Let's tone down the rhetoric and all agree that neither sitting at a bar on the waterfront, nor shopping at Walmart; nor going to kindergarten should require constant vigilance and a bullet proof vest.

I'm so tired of singing this song.