SHOW NOTES:

We had left Vigil Mass on Saturday night where I helped serve Communion as a Eucharistic Minister. (I’ll be the lector next week.) We drove ten minutes to the restaurant for dinner and immediately heard of the shooting at Brown University. (And as I write this, a similar horror at Bondi Beach in Australia which was aimed at Jews celebrating the start of Hanukkah.)

The streets, the classrooms, public gatherings—none is immune to the violence of the mentally ill, the racist, the anti-Semitic, the terrorists, the disaffected who merely seek to kill. Luigi Mangione, who killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a New York street, captured on camera, has pleaded not guilty, and some people have raised a fund for his defense.

Do we kill the school principle if our child has failed a test? Do we murder the coach if our home team is terrible? (Gamblers are currently threatening athletes to underperform which will reward their betting.) Do we kill the event planner if the wedding is not to our liking, or the chef for a bad meal?

In the US, our government representatives are cowardly in not taking action on a bipartisan level to remove the mentally ill from the streets and to enforce stricter gun control laws. (I easily remember all the Representatives and Senators immediately after 9/11 standing on the Capitol steps singing God Bless America together. I drove home cross-country from LA with a client, and we saw cities, bridges, and countrysides adorned with American flags.)

I am not ever again providing funds or voting for anyone of any party who does not make these points a campaign pledge with a plan to implement.

I know there are some of you who resent even a political taint to what I write here, but this is non-partisan, this is a call for freedom—the freedom from violence. We have a right to conduct productive lives and to live and raise our children in safety. When I was a child, poor and in an inner city, I could walk the streets alone, even at night, without fear and without my parents fearing for me. Early this morning, 15 minutes from Brown where I live, I considered taking my gun to walk the dogs in the dark patches of our own lighted backyard. (I didn’t. But I thought about it.)

Some people object to “thoughts and prayers” as if they are of no value. I disagree. And I offer them to the families, to our communities, to all of us.

Right now, at this moment, that’s all I have.