I am exhausted.
I didn’t sleep well last night.
I did some things I really didn’t want to do yesterday.
I didn’t want to watch the videos or to look at the pictures.
I didn’t want to listen to the sickening sounds of a disparate multitude feeling jubilation, then confusion, then abject terror—all in a matter of seconds.
I didn’t want to watch a field full of tiny silhouettes, moving like confused starlings from a threat whose source they couldn’t determine—then seeing so many of those silhouettes drop away, fall to the ground and cease to move.
I didn’t want to hear the rapid staccato of thousands of bullets indiscriminately being shot into strangers from a great distance, and the frantic screams of people yelling, “I’m hit.”
I didn’t want to watch the jittery convulsions of cellphone video taken by a young man pinballing through an impromptu parking lot war zone and falling abruptly onto the pavement, the screen going black.
I didn’t want to listen to the quivering testimony of a shell-shocked teenage girl, wearing a brand new concert t-shirt still soaked with the blood of people she’ll never know.
I didn’t want to see bodies laying in the debris of bottles and food wrappers, and of handbags and cowboy hats left behind in haste.
I didn’t want to look at the fully terrible carnage—because I know from too much experience, how much that takes out of me, the rage it gives birth to, the paralyzing grief it brings with it.
But part of me was afraid to see it all, for fear that I wouldn’t feel those things; that because these images and sounds have all grown so sadly commonplace that I would no longer be moved by them—that I’d stop giving a damn when people die too soon and that it wouldn’t make me physically ill.
There are so many people like that: people who never seem to reach a tipping point of outrage, who don’t seem at all burdened with deeply mourning for lives permanently interrupted by a stranger’s bullets. They somehow have a greater passion for the gun than for the gunned down, and there will never be enough bloodshed to make them change their allegiance.
I didn’t want to watch those videos or look at those pictures or listen to those terrible sounds—but I did.
I did this, because as exhausting as it all is—I know it is far less exhausting than rushing to the hospital in the hopes that you’ll reach a loved one in time to say goodbye.
Watching those videos and seeing those pictures, is much less sickening than getting a text from your child telling you they love you for the last time.
Having to look at those vomit-inducing images is far less horrible than having to make funeral arrangements for someone who was perfectly healthy a day earlier.
I want to honor those lives, by seeing what I’d rather look away from, by hearing sounds that will keep me up at night, by being moved to near collapse—so that I sustain a fitting anger at all of this senseless death.
I want to dwell on every single beautiful human being laying there in that field, so that they do not become a piece of data; an acceptable amount of collateral damage for someone else’s supposed freedom.
Gun lover, I so wish you were as tired of this as I am.
I wish thousands and thousands of deaths every year could move you enough to move.
I wish you could tap into an empathy to eclipse your gun lust.
Maybe you don’t watch the videos and you don’t look at the pictures and you don’t listen to the terrible sounds.
Maybe that’s your secret.
Maybe that’s why you’re not so tired right now.
Maybe that’s how you sleep at night while other people live nightmares.
I wish you were as tired as they are today.
I wish you were as tired as I am today.
It would probably save people.
Order John’s book, ‘A Bigger Table’ here.
