Response

Today we grieve, as we have done so many times in the past and only hope we don’t have to encounter again in future. Today we mourn loss, we beg for answers, we cry from the depths of our hearts in the face of tragedy. We hold our babies and hug our friends and kneel to pray.

In the moment after our initial reaction to senseless violence there is a vital step we take. Two paths wait there for us as individuals and as a community.

Down one path we react. We allow anger and fear to rise above all other voices and we choose to hole ourselves up in our homes, away from the world, disconnected from our neighbors and we call it safety. In reaction we ask for more guns, more security, more decisions made in fear and scarcity of hope. We decide on this path that…