I am to blame

I guess I've been in a funk...stumbling around in a darkened place with no sense of direction and no real desire to search for an escape. Making excuses why, won't lessen my culpability. I am to blame.

I've been silent when I needed to shout.
I've been distant when intimacy was needed.
I've been compliant when I should have protested.

Accepting wavering shades of gray, blurring the lines until what's obvious, isn't.
When good men do nothing, evil prevails. I am to blame.

I'm the consumer who purchased the movie, music, video game or book containing filth and violence.
I'm the spectator who said, "That's wrong" but did nothing to stop it from happening again and again and again.

For every action there's a reaction. The same is true for inaction. To stand idly by and watch your country kill itself slowly one classroom at a time, one unborn baby at a time...is treason. You can not claim to love something and then silently watch it implode. You might as well cheer.

I am to blame.

Every time I sat down to write about the madness we've all seen on TV the last few days, I'd get so angry that I could only walk away disgusted.

I've tried everything imaginable to ease this ache in my heart. I've decided its staying for awhile and with it an undeniable rage. How could anyone, crazy or not, kill a bunch of little kids and women?

If there ever comes a day...

Every law enforcement officer knows the feelings I'm about to describe. Few other professions experience the emotions I'm about to reveal. Nurses, doctors, morticians and maybe a hose-dragger or two, are able to relate to what I'm about to say.

We are constantly surrounded by death. The dead, the dying, the use-to-be. We gun-toters lean toward cynical, mechanical, calloused when it comes to death. We accept it for what it is...a part of life. We take no pleasure in the loss of life, but we also feel unattached to the "normal" emotions that humans typically feel when we witness it. That is of course, until the chilly fingers of death touch someone we care about.

When the inevitable happens...we feel way too much. Every nerve fiber in our bodies are on overdrive, every sensory skill tasked to the threshold, every muscle in our jaw clinches to near teeth-breaking strength. And then we collapse into nothingness. Drained of our tears, we lay fragile, broken, spent.

We will eventually recover, but we won't ever be the same. Death (of any kind) hurts. It may be the end of a long term relationship. Or the end of a marriage. It may be the end of a friendship or the end of a career. It may be the loss of a four-legged friend or the loss of mobility or youth.

Any loss, death or otherwise, changes who you are and who you thought you were. It makes you stop, if only for a moment and consider what's important. Death does something else...it sweetens the memories for the ones left behind; for that, I'm grateful.