I had snuck into their room at 4:00 am and crowed like a rooster. All three of the McMonkeys awoke, perplexed and frustrated. Eventually, they all laughed, jumped out of bed and excitedly grabbed the bags they had packed the night before, for the big trip to Disneyland...
We pulled in on the bus about eight hours later, dragging from the stop and go merry go round of standing in lines for airports, planes and the eventual bus we just had walked off of...
When we got to the Magic Kingdom, that was when I first saw that hypnotic gaze, so amazed and overwhelmed by the fairy tale world that surrounded him; he was lost for that moment in the exquisite unreality of that small section of time...
Fast forward about six years...
My father is talking about Orlando, a mass shooting, fifty dead and fifty three injured, as my now almost eleven year old sons mouth drops open, his eyes glaze over a bit, as he fights to understand that this really just happened.
An eerie kind of replay, of that day long past...
It was not a movie or video game; it was tragic and real and almost unfathomable to his loving and innocent little mind...
Miles away from where we had been, but not many.
This was not the stuff of Disneyland...
So Facebook loads up with all the people to blame, just as it did when a black church was shot up, when a Colorado movie theatre, an Army base and an east coast elementary school listed those murdered, to the press.
Homophobes, racists, Muslims and NRA gun nuts...
We have this crazy inherent need to define the ever changing enemy, in a useless attempt to pigeonhole some segment or group responsible for all of these tragedies. In hopes of illusionary control, we trade an uneasy feeling of brotherhood for any profile that fits our present fears...
My son will soon ask " Who are the bad guys"?!?
I struggle for an honest answer.
He will want a simple answer, just like all of us do, standing here today, crying for justice, want. He will want a picture, a face, a characteristic, that will fit all those who commit such atrocities...
Me too, kid ; me too...
I can give it to him, I think...
Not one race or society has ever been free from atrocities. Jew, German, English, Native American... All the way back to Cain, the list goes...
No religion is free of crackpots, doing awful things in the name of a God they have no understanding of. No philosophy, exempt...
Sadly, the one thing in common to all these killers is a DNA sequence called " human".
I know many people of many faiths; I know deniers of God, doubters and devoted followers.
All of them shared broken hearts for every victim of these shootings.
I think that's common in all our DNA, too...
We are both a mess and a miracle.
So we can search for bad guys...
Or we can let that inborn spark of common decency and love, that we all share, unite us and bring us together...
I can give him that picture we all want in our anger, or I can reframe it by changing my own viewing perspective, and focus on the best it has to offer, the best we all have to offer...
So often, we humans find the ability; are Graced with the ability, to step over all that evil would use to separate us, and use it to unite us, in love...
Sometimes we screw that up big-time, and we release our worst.
It feels like a crap shoot, sometimes.
But it's not...
It comes down to a simple choice.
We mirror the evil or we let God heal our souls, and allow Him to right our misguided instincts..
It can't be that simple...
But it is...
It is.
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