Our American Pandemic

 ("What to Know About the Colorado Grocery Store Shooting")

Over this past year death has come so rapidly that our brains can't possibly process, nor our hearts respond to every loss with equal compassion. We have been overwhelmed and understandably numbed. Then the guns come out, the bodies pile up in the blink of an eye and death reveals to us the faces of those suddenly taken.

Those lost in Georgia and now in Colorado are victims to a different insanity than the one that has stalked us for a year now. These tragedies not because we had no cure but because we had no political courage. Guns proliferating as a perpetual pandemic of our own doing.The shots this week not meant to stop our horror but to reenforce it. 

And yet we know from our history that tomorrow our response will become muted, this disease allowed to mutate, each new variant a momentary horror we recoil from and then merely catalogue. Death from these weapons of mass destruction but numbers on a page.

This sickness home grown and spread. Our American pandemic.