050: Every Two Years

I had trouble sleeping last night.

I feel helpless in the face of so much disaster and heartbreak.

People scream that we need to vote and I think, “We already did.”

People demand Congress act and I think, “They already are.”

People say it’s the gun lobby and corrupt politicians and I don’t know how to explain to them that millions of Americans vote against gun control. Millions of people are not being bribed by the gun lobby. Most of them are quite intelligent. They’re not being brainwashed. They are willingly, in their right minds, choosing this.

Every two years, millions of Americans can vote for a legislator or a governor or a president, and every two years millions of Americans vote for the one that is against gun control.

Every two years, millions of Americans pick guns over education, guns over immigration, guns over women, guns over highway funds and healthcare and improved sewage systems.

Every two years, millions of Americans pick guns over children.

I don’t know how to explain to anyone that the beauty and horror of democracy is that everyone gets to vote for the world they want to live in, and that millions of Americans vote for this world. This is the world that they want to live in.

Millions of Americans make this bed every two years, and they seem perfectly content letting their children die in it.

I don’t know how to fight that.

I don’t know how to keep mourning when millions of Americans slept well last night.

I don’t know how to cry over someone else’s child again, knowing that millions of Americans didn’t last night.

I don’t know anymore.