Thoughts on Highlands Ranch

We are in national crisis.

Tuesday’s shooting is just another attack, as faceless and nameless as the rest. Another strike at who we are as a people.

But who the American people are has changed. There comes a point when we have to realize that it’s not just a problem with Americans shooting up schools, or a problem with shooting up theatres, or bars, or concerts, or nightclubs, or universities, or yoga studios, or hospitals, or synagogues.

This is America: the brutal reality that gun massacres can happen anytime, anywhere. We are long overdue some self-reflection, to see that this epidemic is not solvable with increased school security because threats happen everywhere.

And everytime another massacre runs its course I turn off my phone and try to get on with my life. Because in America, it happens daily and we can’t handle internalizing a mass killing down the street everyday. We have grown numb to tragedy to the point that we simply don’t care.

And when we, each, inevitably, are cornered by a gunman at work our at the dentist’s or at any other part of this country, will we even be affected by the murder? Will we stare down the barrel without a trace of fear, facing them down with fatal disapprobation?

That fear is our humanity, and it’s slipping away.

Ignorance is bliss until you get shot.