Speak Out

boys fishing at Wheaton Regional Park, MD; December 2012

Of course this post is inspired by the Blogger Day Of Silence that many blogs observed yesterday (and some are observing today) in memory of the tragedy in Connecticut last Friday; it would be disingenuous to pretend that my urgency here is anything other than a response to both the tragedy and to our community's corresponding reactions.  But it's an urgency that has been building for years and that should have reached a breaking point before the shooting - before the shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut, or at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, or at a movie theater in Aurora, or any of a dozen shootings before that. The time to talk about the steps we need to take to ensure that these massacres never happen again was yesterday.

And we should talk.  "Only with gun violence," Ezra Klein of The Washington Post wrote last week, "do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not."  We remember the victims of these horrific events with our silence, but we honor with them our words and actions - and today, despite everything, I ask you to speak out.

There are so many issues wrapped up in this devastating tragedy and all those that came before it.  We need to reexamine our gun control laws, certainly, but also how we deal with mental health in this country and how a culture of sensationalism has normalized violence.  If you do choose to memorialize what happened with a day of silence, please think not just about the senselessness of the killings but also about how we can prevent similar incidents in the future.  If you cannot yet enunciate how this tragedy affects you, please take the time and space you need to make sense of what you're feeling and why.  And if you are confused by the barrage of conflicting views on everything, including the right way to grieve and, yes, including this post, please educate yourself as much as possible so that you feel better informed and more in control.

But then we need to step forward and demand change.  As President Obama said on Sunday night at the interfaith vigil in Newtown, "We will be told that the causes of such violence are complex, and that is true.  No single law, no set of laws can eliminate evil from the world or prevent ever senseless act of violence in our society, but that can't be an excuse for inaction.  Surely we can do better than this."

We can do better than this and we must, so please take a stand and speak in whatever medium you are most comfortable.  In the long term, silence will not effect change; only words will lead to action.