Let it never be said that Twitter doesn’t do any good.
I don’t usually check the news before I leave for work, bu sometimes, if we’re slow, Ill scroll through Twitter. Yesterday, I was checking Twitter, and found several tweets about a mass shooting in Orlando.
For those of you who don’t know, fifty people were killed in an act of domestic terrorism in a gay nightclub called Pulse, in Orlando Florida.
After that, I kept off of Twitter for awhile. I couldn’t stand what I was reading.
This leads me to share with you some things I am damned well sick of, as an American. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to share them with you today.
I’m sick of gun violence.
A gun is a weapon, like a knife or a flame. Any of them can be used for good, or bad. I’m from Western PA, there are some families that I know, and know well, that only have meat in their freezers in the winter because of deer hunting. I like guns, actually, I was on the rifle team in school.
But nothing else that private citizens can get their hands on is as capable as a gun of killing large amounts of people quickly. No, guns don’t kill people, but people kill other people far more effectively with them.
Today is June 12. We are 165 days into this year, and there have been 133 mass shooting in America already. (Source: Bustle.com, VOX) I don’t know what the answer to this is. That’s why I’m a blogger and not a politician. But it would be nice if we were doing, I don’t know, literally anything.
I’m sick of anti gay violence.
If I thought I couldn’t be angrier about gay rights than I was after North Carolina’s recent decision to allow persecution against gay and transgender individuals, I was obviously wrong. People died, literally died, because they were at a gay night club. And I’m sick of it. I’m sick of people thinking they’ve got any sort of right to say what someone else should or shouldn’t do with their lives. Even if you really think that gay people are sinning, you don’t have a right to say or do anything to them!
I’m sick of anti Muslim hate.
And while we’re on the subject of hating other people, let me just remind everyone reading this that the majority of shootings in America are committed by non Muslim people. The Muslim faith is similar to Christianity in many ways, including the fact that we both have a whole spectrum of faithfuls. We have the selfless and devout who spend their lives working to help people because of their faith. We have the people like me who believe, and try to be good people, but mostly just go about our days making small sins and trying to help our brothers and sisters when we can. And we’ve got the crazies who kill people and say that God/Allah wanted them to do it.
I’m sick of the conversation being about everything but gun control.
Over the next few days, you’re going to hear all sorts of things about gun violence, and how we need stronger protections. We’ll hear, from certain people, how this sort of things wouldn’t happen if we would stop letting foreigners (mostly the ones with dark skin) into the country. That’s all bullshit. What we need to do is uphold the laws we have, and close loopholes like gun shows. We need to become a society that values differences, that celebrates differences. We should be a society in which the very thought of disliking someone because they’re different is deplorable, reprehensible. And we need to start keeping control of our guns. This man shot 103 people. How did he do that, without taking time to reload? Why was he ever allowed to get his hands on a gun that could fire that many times? You might say that making things illegal won’t stop people from getting them. That’s true, you are absolutely right. But it will lessen the amount of people who have them. And, quite frankly, it’s better than doing nothing.
I’m sick of being scared.
I was fifteen on September 11th, 2001. And it seems, I swear, like I’ve been scared ever since. Or, at least, I’ve been told I should be, treated like we all should be. I have seen us overreact, take away freedoms, take leaps and strides toward a 1984 sort of world. I have seen people cower, I have seen safety measures increased, but never have I felt a single bit safer, because we are never doing enough. We are taught to hate the stranger, hate the one who is different, because he might be a threat. We are not encouraged to befriend those who look or think different. We have been taught, as Americans, to stick to our own kind.
Thank you for allowing me to rant today. If you take anything away from this post, take this. Don’t let people tell you to be scared. Don’t hate blindly, don’t blame a group for the actions of a few. Know your history, it will help you process what happens today. And look after your fellow man, no matter his skin color or religion. Please, don’t take this as an excuse to hate.
Take this as an excuse to love.
Paper Beats World 