A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Three-Hundred-And-Fifteen

All this is too exhausting, all of it.  The theatre of care that will be presented, the unactioned speech, the prayers that never soothe, that come in place of actual help.  What will be done?  What will be done and not merely said?  It has been too long.  It has been decades of this, decades where you might be shot at the supermarket or at the movies, when children must fear their own classrooms.  He, too, was just a boy.  That is not to dismiss it, to excuse or pardon, but we must ask ourselves what it means when our youth claim each others lives this way.  We must wonder what it says that our society produces this, and not only once, but again and again.  We do nothing, though, we ask none of the questions.  Will anything change this time?  I do not have much hope, and I am so tired of feeling hopeless.  If nothing changes, if those in power now can do nothing, if this system we have built will not respond, that must be understood.  We must realize that it means we have failed.  If this is what America has become, if this nation cannot change to heal the deep wounds that have us bleeding out in the streets almost daily, what is left for us?  It must end, one way or another.  If we do not change it, it will still be our end.

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