DOA

As another mass shooting becomes but a statistic that sits contiguous to the ones that came before and will, inevitably be astride the one that appears in the tomorrows to come, we must admit defeat. Our battle to inject life into a moribund argument has been lost.

Day after day, month after month and year after year, our children have been taken from us. Futures have been stolen. Our landscape is overflowing with anguish and pain, broken dreams, broken promises, shattered families. There is nothing left to say, no more images to detail the horror. And yet the madness has proliferated unabated. This is no longer merely a bad dream, a nightmare. This is what we will wake up to every morning and this is what will be our lot each night when we close our eyes. We must understand that THIS is our reality.

Shame on those leaders in our country who have permitted THIS to happen on their watch. Shame on the lobbyists, shame on the NRA, who have measured the value of existence in dollars and cents. 

Today, when they add up the number of dead, there must be one more included. Opposition to the insanity of a nation accepting as the reasonable cost of doing business, mass casualties and over 100 deaths every day at the wrong end of a gun is now DOA.

And it has been as easy to accomplish as turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the destruction that stares us in the face and screams at us in desperate voice. 

This nation should all mourn the loss. And this nation should not rest in peace.