In the past week, I’ve been to an in person graduation, a virtual graduation, watched an online and an in person movie, gone to the pool, jumped off the diving board, seen a falling star, barbecued ribs and read a book. My teens also through a party, we had a bonfire, ordered tickets for a concert in June and ate ice cream. I love seizing the day, but don’t want to make a habit of trying to do everything on my summer list in a week.
One of my goals is to write five hundred words a day, and to submit a piece a week somewhere. Today, I’ve been hitting the blank page without much joy. I tell my students, working when you don’t feel it is the difference between a hobby and a serious pursuit. At the moment, my fingers, brain and heart are fighting with my soul because the first three want vacation –like no words, but my whole self rebels against forfeiting that reality. It would be easier to be just…just something…or less something…but that’s just not something my soul allows.
So I must ask, is that desire for more vanity or aspiration, is it vocation or ambition? I’ve come up against this wall before, and every time, the wall seems bigger, more imposing. Climbing over the wall or breaking through it will require I persist…and right now, I feel like my students, I smell summer and want it now. I’d like to be floating down a slow and lazy cool river with a cold drink and somewhere someone piping cool rock as we drift.
Okay, so I’ve watched and read lots about wanting a solution to both the threat that automatic weapons pose to the public at large when people have such ease of access, and the desire of those who fear for reasons both legitimate and otherwise, government overreach –which is always possible. Bottom line, these automatic weapons are designed to kill, that is their purpose –and they do it well. Reasonable people want these weapons to be at least more difficult to obtain than actual effective Sudafed, and require at least as much updating and training and maintaining of responsibility as is required of the teachers who now must in addition to everything else, consider the possibility of being either human shields or a sitting ducks since the current plan is status quo –the shootings will continue to be random and ongoing because nothing but the number of people who have been injured or killed by mass shooters will change.
If I sound angry, it’s because I remember when teachers walked our children out to the car for pick up during the DC sniper fall, and I do not want people to become lulled by summer or constancy of the news, or the political victories that will be counted or not, into not insisting of our government that we do something tangible and real. If someone needs an idea of what that might be, this editorial from the Washington Post that ran in 2018 and reran this week with few revisions since little has changed, is a good starting point. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/02/gun-control-solutions-that-work/
However more than that, we need to reawaken in our communities, (in our whole society), a sense of ownership of this nation –over party, over corporations, over influencers so to speak. We need to explain to both parties, to all elected, that if they don’t act, they will as a matter of course lose their jobs. We need to make it happen. We also need to as ordinary folk, apply for every elected position in the nation so that no one in any place, runs unopposed. To break the control that parties have over policy, we need to work to ensure no one can guarantee their position of authority except by protecting the public good over party interests. We need to be more, as a people and to a person, if we are to be a nation that values life, liberty and holds that all are equal, and if we also believe that domestic tranquility is something we should not merely hope for, but expect.
Guess I needed to cram all of that summer into the weekend if only to shake off the frustration of watching our society just endure these tragedies, with little signs of anything other than sighs as the list gets longer.
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