Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.     

Khalil Gibran

Forgive me if I get preachy today. It’s been a rough couple of days “in the news.” And I’m guessing that’s where most of us want to keep it—far the hell away from us. In El Paso. In Parkland. In Las Vegas. In Sandy Hook. In Dayton. In Christchurch. There. New Zealand. That’s far enough away.

And that’s our luxury. My luxury. To turn off the news. To swipe up on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit. To pretend that the Betts family doesn’t exist (i.e., that the brother didn’t shoot the sister and the parents didn’t lose two kids this past Sunday). To wish away the 2-month-old in a hospital in El Paso with broken bones from the weight of his parents trying to shield him from bullets. And that boy’s 6-year-old- sister, who just lose both parents. And that baby, in the hospital alone, who never got the chance to know them. He lost them to a man-child so unbelievably lost himself, that hate and death became his only purpose on this earth. For the love of guns, stop it.

We check out because it’s all too much. Too overwhelming. Too political. Not political enough. And the truth is, I have nothing new to add to this conversation. Just my voice. And that’s not enough. It will never be. It will never bring back a single person. But it’s what I can do. Join the conversation rather than remaining a silent voyeur hoping “it” doesn’t come to my neighborhood. To my church. My Wal-Mart. My home. In hopes that many voices of solidarity overpower a single cowardly manifesto of hate on a site that preaches to its own choir. In the hopes that my voice can reach the next lonely boy with an AK contemplating life and death. For the love of guns, stop it.

There’s so much that divides us. A gun. To protect or to kill? To stop additional life lost or to take it? It’s both and. Nothing will change that. We desire individual choice. We have free will. I sure hope we remember how to choose each other and this great big ball we’re living on. I sure hope we choose relationship over fear and hate and loneliness. I sure hope we learn how to face our “others” and allow ourselves to be challenged and changed.

If a Mexican, Muslim or a gay man threaten you by their mere existence, look real hard in the mirror. What are you actually afraid of? What are you holding on to so tightly that letting go would end you? Would it? Would acknowledging that man’s pain and struggle, foreign to you as it may be, be akin to your own demise? It would not. Pain is one of those funny universal things. No one escapes. His pain is yours… if you’ll only look him in the eye. You might just see a better version of you.

We know the founding fathers did not conceive of automatic assault weapons with high capacity magazines. We know the elk, moose and deer didn’t see it coming. Well, here we are. Now what in the hell are we going to do? What will we do with our big, shiny rights? Are your arms tired from bearing your arms so high above human life?

We’ll do a lot for the love of guns. I hope we’ll do the same for each other.