I have some really great posts in the works, I have been writing up a storm, but I doubt any of them will appear anywhere today.
Today I cannot help but to remember how the Old Pueblo came together to support the families of six individuals who lost their lives, and the 12 who lived but were injured. I remember standing vigil outside University Med Center down the street from my house at twilight and into the evening that day. A friend who is a minister led us in prayer. And I actually prayed and attempted to wrap the survivors in focused loving thoughts and life energy. I rarely ask God, the Goddess, the Universe for anything. The only prayer that means anything to me is a prayer to be vessel of good, of light and love.
Good comes from evil if enough of us choose to build it.
The evil in Tucson three years ago was not an individual. The evil came from a negligent and greedy society that allowed and continues to allow:
- the mentally, emotionally, and neurologically ill to go untreated,
- from a weapons industry that propagandizes to justify its massive profits from the retail sale of the technology of killing large number of people in very short amounts of time
- hate speech to pass as “news”
- career politicians to act in their own interests rather than the interests of their constituents
- and, the glorification of violence in media and as entertainment
I knew several of the individuals involved intimately or peripherally that day. In the 1990s I worked with one of the guys shot. I had talked to Gabby several times at events here in Tucson as well as in D.C., she was my Congresswoman, I attended music events with another person who was shot as he was a good friend of a good friend. My husband was in conversation with Gabe, one of those killed, about science innovation in the district. I knew someone else who was in the parking lot that day as the shots were fired and then almost lost his job for talking about his personal beliefs about guns with a reporter. No close friends or family were hurt, thank heavens, but I was shaken. I was transported back to the year I lived in Arlington, VA and the DC sniper was active. One of the deaths was at a shopping center I went to several times a week. I have been touched by gun violence before that too, more than once. I know how long these acts continue to reverberate through lives. It is forever.
I now know a wonderful writer, another Tucson-based blogger, who was critically injured that day in Tucson. She almost died from her wounds. She just wanted to bring her little friend, a neighbor girl, to meet Gabby. If you want a real story of lives impacted by extended clips and semi-automatic weaponry, read her blog post today that is a letter to Christina-Taylor Green.
If you want to help change the world so fewer anniversaries like today’s are observed, act:
Leave a Reply