Walls

Yesterday, in a matter of just a few hours, I was forced to reconcile the news of the Las Vegas shootings and the death of Tom Petty.

In the most scrutinizing of ways, neither of those events really have a huge impact on my life.

I didn't know anyone in Vegas at the time and other than just hoping to maybe one day see Petty play and appreciating him as an enormous talent and influence, I wasn't the biggest fan and hadn't listened to him in years.

But, I was moved deeply by both tragedies, and in different ways.

Listening to the constant rhetoric of the last few years from both major parties has been as frustrating for me as it has been for most Americans. And to have something like this happen, again, and see the tragedy become a political talking point, again, and to know in my heart that we as a country will, again, do nothing about it is enough to make me feel hopeless. Even if it was just talking, at least there might be a chance that a solution, some sort of insurance against this happening once again, could be reached. But it's just people screaming at each other.

When I saw the original announcement that Petty had passed away, like a lot of people I posted a comment on social media. Something to the effect of "If this world gets any darker, we're going to need a supernova to find our way back."

It feels very much like we're losing the light. The things that in thousands, millions, billions of years from now you would want people, or some alien race, or whatever is is we evolve into, to look at and say, "damn, they had an amazingly rich culture."

It feels more an more like what will be said, maybe just a hundred years from now, is that we couldn't stop shouting at each other long enough to realize what an amazing world we live in. What an amazing time we live in. But maybe that's the thing the poets understand that we still can't get. Maybe you can't appreciate it until it's gone.

Here's hoping 50 years from now some candidate will be running for political office with a familiar platform. Make America Great Again. Only this time he'll mean the America that recognizes the basic human rights of everyone in her boarders, the America that says love has nothing to do with gender, that a living wage for any individual is a necessity, and that the health and safety of its citizens is a priority and not a business.

It's scattered an all over the place, but it's what I'm feeling.