With incredible sadness I have changed my portrait and background pictures on Facebook to the Spartan block S and a view of my favorite place on the northside of campus of Michigan State University. MSU was my other mother as I transitioned from a gangly confused teen to a young adult. For my generation Michigan State was a place of safety and nurturing. For my generation it was an island separated from the outside world where we lived in freedom.
But there are no places of safety left in American schools at any level. There is no freedom left from gun violence, from active shooter alerts, from mourning the dying left bleeding out in ivy covered buildings and on the green campus lawns of college and universities.
Despite America’s ongoing and seemingly growing cycles of violence and regret, there is still what seems to be the ultimate freedom of American culture, the unfettered right to buy, possess and use guns and ammunition. From kindergarten children to young adults at college, we see the deaths daily. As Americans our vision of this horror grows quickly hazy and we just move on without trying to make it stop.
The Second Amendment was never intended to take a position higher than all the Ten Commandments by our founding statespersons. But we have let the meaning of this “right” be warped over the years to an anything goes stance with regard to more powerful and more deadly weapons. A powder horn and a muzzle loader owned by a family on a farm are not the same thing as large capacity magazine and an AR-15 owned by an urban dweller.
It is time for change. Maybe we need to redraft the Second Amendment to reflect the reality on the ground in American to allow rational restrictions on gun ownership and use. We can’t keep doing nothing. Offering thoughts and prayers my friends after the fact, well that is doing nothing with a capital N.
I did not receive a call last night telling me something horrible had happened to either of my sons. No parent should ever have to get that call. Ever. I did however spend almost all of last night talking to my sons in East Lansing from five time zones away counseling them on how to make their home as safe as possible. I stayed on the phone with them trying to keep them calm as the world around them was turned into the chaotic madness gun violence generates.
My Spartan heart is broken and my eyes are filled with tears over the horror in East Lansing. Things have to change. We have to make them change.
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