Yesterday was my daughter's seventeenth birthday. I had planned on posting something, but the news got in the way. How do we protect ourselves and our loved ones when someone goes over some edge mentally? Can we? I know it comes as a surprise to my friends who think I'm a raving Democrat that I do, in fact, believe in the right to bear arms (and while I joke that I'm a card carrying member of the NRA, I'm not). Would gun control really have helped, or would this young man still have found a way to get his hands on a weapon? I don't have any answers. My heart goes out to the families of the victims of this tragedy - including the family of this poor, disturbed young man.
Here I stand again, speaking to an empty room. My thoughts aren't worth the cyberspace they would take up if I cared to tweet or post to Facebook, but here I stand anyway. I had no idea how long it had been since my muse had forced me to write. I used to write almost daily, poetry mostly, when I was younger and believed that someone cared what I had to say. I wanted to be e.e. cummings or T.S. Eliot or anyone who seemed to be so comfortable in his own skin to pour out his emotions onto a blank page. It took me a few years to realize that the writers who filled my pantheon of literary deities were not that comfortable after all, but wrote because not writing was more painful than the spilling of emotion. So I think I will take up my keyboard once more, wade out into the battle, and write.
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