Okay…this isn’t a continuation of my vacation report post of last week. For good reason.
Like most Americans with a soul (this excludes the GOP), my heart is broken over the slaughter of innocents in Florida last week.
Still.
My Facebook timeline is full of antigun memes that I’ve posted. I know people on Facebook are wondering why I’m still harping on this gun control thing and the FL shooting.
I mean, wasn’t that so last week…?
That’s what’s become of us Americans. Oh – another week, another massacre using semi-automatic weapons built to shoot between 4 to 8 rounds a second. No biggie. It happens all the time.
And as the gun rights advocates say, “Your dead children don’t override my 2nd Amendment rights.” Seriously.
We are losing our souls and our ability to feel horror at the type of mass murder we tragically experience on a regular basis.
But I’m just not ready to move on and watch baby goat videos yet.
I still feel the horror. Still hear the heartbreak in the parents voices who lost children. Still think of the young children who lost their parents; brave teachers trying to shield their students from death.
But I sense a glimmer of something different happening this time.
Yes, the GOP lawmakers who’ve taken the NRA blood money will still continue to offer up their ‘thoughts and prayers’ and then do nothing. And the NRA will probably double down on their efforts to buy our Republican Congressional cowards. And the impotent gun loving lunatics who say they need an assault rifle to hunt ‘varmints and coyotes’ (I had somebody actually tell me that’s why they needed their assault rifle!) will go out and buy more just to prove the point that they can.
But there is something in the wind. Something that feels new this time.
I won’t call it hope. That would be too optimistic.
The students of Parkland, FL are speaking out. Loudly. They are calling out the ‘thoughts and prayers’ of the GOP for the B.S. that it is. They aren’t stupid. They know hypocrisy when they see it and hear it.
And the GOP has their hypocrisy on full display this time.
The students of Parkland, FL are sick of being told their right to live doesn’t supersede the crazies right to own high powered killing machines. They are sick of their lives being sold to the NRA by their elected officials. They are sick of do nothing politicians who care more about getting re-elected than protecting kids.
They are calling for a student and teacher walk out all over the country. And a march on Washington DC and in as many other cities in the US that want to organize one. They will be demanding our elected officials do something about these senseless, preventable slaughters. They will be demanding sensible gun legislation that will aim to keep these killing machines out of the hands of the mentally ill, those with criminal or domestic abuse backgrounds, teenage kids…
And if you don’t like the the term ‘gun legislation’, let’s call it massacre prevention.
AGMA will be marching with them.
Because I don’t want my grandchildren to be afraid to go to school. And I don’t want to be afraid for them.
#Enough
Aging Gracefully My Ass 