Tragedy

Those of you who follow my blip know these three trees are special to me as I have blipped them many times. In my mind they represent three loves in my life - my wife and two daughters.  I drive past them nearly every day and say hello, as if one of my girls were sitting right beside me.  Memories flood my mind.  A special holiday.  A school event. Generally the memories are rather simple, but they are always beautiful. A deeply rooted symbol of life, found in the collective unconscious of all of us, constantly changing, rising to the heavens.

Today, I stopped to commune with the trees for a bit.  President Obama's remarks about the shooting at Umpqua Community College reverberated from the car radio.  Concerning the tragic state of affairs around gun violence in my country, he said "This is a political choice we make, to allow this to happen every few months in America.  We collectively are answerable to those families who lose their loved ones because of our inaction." 

In the wake of tragic violence like this, many of us too soon and too often revert to apathetic, catatonic numbness. We have our own "messes" to deal with at work, or elsewhere.  The pressures of our own existence keep us from writing our legislators, or creating art from our mad as hell state's of mind.  These same pressures sometimes lead to narrow mindedness and ugly rhetoric because we may feel our rights are being trampled upon if someone suggests that there are real problems that need to be challenged.

Like the collective symbol of the trees that is carved into the deep recesses of my brain, I too feel a strong collective responsibility to the families who grieve today, for this loss and any other preventable tragedy.  As a people, as a nation, we can and should - we must - do more.

Today the trees are black as I mourn the loss of life.