Midland and Odessa

I called Amy on Saturday night after I’d learned about the murders in Midland and Odessa.

I said, “I don’t feel right.”

I know this happens all the time. In fact, this is the fourth massacre in Texas in under two years. And just last year alone there were 340 mass shootings in America. Amy and I were just talking about this same thing the night before because we’d both read news stories about a shooting at a high school football game in Mobile, Alabama.

In other words, this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Because of our country’s deference to the gun lobby and the NRA at the expense of the lives of our fellow Americans — our unwillingness to pass background checks, red flag laws; our inability to stop selling weapons of war and our failure to buy those back that have already been sold… because of what we’ve accepted, our complicity in 100 gun deaths a day… because of all of this, logically, this was bound to happen.

So what made me feel so sick, so sad, so angry?

Maybe it was because it hadn’t even been a month since the last mass shooting in West Texas, when 22 people were killed at a Walmart in El Paso.

Maybe in the aftermath we all took some false comfort, like lightning couldn’t strike twice.

Because when it comes down to it, we look at these shootings like we would a lightning strike, a natural disaster, an act of God, something you couldn’t predict or plan for, couldn’t stop even if you wanted to. Just gotta take your chances and accept that it happens.

Like lightning, we think about how to protect ourselves despite the threat — bulletproof backpacks for our kids; active shooter drills in our schools; deciding what window you’re going to jump out of, which bookshelf you’ll pull down, how you’ll get your kid to safety or how you might have to shelter them by sacrificing your body and your life.

Now, *you* may not look at it that way… You may be the one organizing the march for our lives, the walkout from your school, the local Moms Demand chapter. But, *we*, we are all in this together, for good or for bad. For life or for death. And in a government of, by and for the people, we judge ourselves by whether we’ve changed this, or failed to change this.

And so far, we’ve absolutely failed to change this.

On that phone call, Amy said, “I don’t feel right, either.”

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