Murder

In the woods, the boy finds a fallen branch. Holds it up. A little later, I watch while he lies across a wide circular swing on his soft belly, pointing the stick at the other wide circular swing, where three three-year-olds, one born of me, sit, smiling and swinging. He looks like a mass shooter in a custodian's closet, machine gun on shoulder, mouth ruffling his tongue and lips to sound like the rounds of rapid-fire bullets burning through air and bone. He is probably between 12 and 14 years old.

I stare at him. He doesn't notice. I look to the women talking over him, the women with him, but they do not notice. I then move to stand between the boy and the girls, with the center of my back blocking his ignorant play. I sense him adjusting, stretching around me. The girls notice. They make the machine gun sounds with their own mouths, while still smiling and swinging. They do not understand. Bless them.

Inside my body and brain, judgment, anger and sadness rise.
Columbine.
Newtown.
The Boston Marathon.
Parkland.
The Pulse Nightclub.
Santa Fe High School.
Las Vegas.
Virginia Tech.
Mass shootings to list and list and list.
And all of this just makes me wonder. Why do we entertain ourselves with murder?

I have seen the video game where the player murders monsters. The player is then given gold and the glory of victory. Then there are the movies where the heroes murder monsters with explosives, fire, swords, and bullets. King Kong. Stormtroopers. Orcs. Death Eaters. Dinosaurs. There are the television shows where the accused are shot in the back by the good guys, the vigilante judges, juries and executioners. There are the television shows where the unkind kings are killed by poisonous wine. Then there are the films where zombies and great white sharks and enemy armies are cut to pieces.

This is our entertainment, watching bad guys bleed, choke, wheeze, fall, and die.

What do the good guys do to the bad guys? The good guys (with confidence, fast cars, muscles, sexy wardrobes and weapons, epic soundtracks, and impossibly impressive targeting) chauffeur the seamless endings again and again and again. Yet, when we walk out into the bright light of real life, people are complicated, flawed as they fumble and bumble and stumble through time.

We see it in the news. Someone makes someone else into a monster, a monster to be murdered.

We entertain ourselves with the over-simplified hate of separateness. Good and Evil. And then we walk around the world of grays and rainbows, of dirt, sea, sky, skin, and egos, of weapons, of kitchen knives, chemicals, cars, machine guns, and sticks, and blind to our oneness, we do harm.

I do not believe that these isolated screens where insanity screams for violence is quenching some deep human instinct or need inside of us. Inside of us, we are lit like the sun. We are one, one piece of all peace. We just need the space and silence and stillness to sit with it, see it and believe it. We need a flood of love to cool and wet the planting of lit matches throughout the dry forests of us. A flood of love to grow us up, and not burn us (and the whole good world) down to soot and ash. A flood followed by seed and sun. Give us boats, GOD. Let us float among flowers as they grow from the fire-fallow earth. Let us abandon this poison, this pain, and be young again.