My spirit is so deeply grieved by this horrific massacre in Oregon and by the predictable partisan bickering about what we should do about it. America, we can and must do better. We owe it to our ancestors who fought and sacrificed and compromised and immigrated and bled to build our nation. The status quo cannot be OK. We must stop the killing of our children, our students, our innocent fellow citizens going about their daily business. As a nation we have become so deeply polarized that we have only one default setting: opposition: the imperative that we must fight the other party at all costs. As soon as any president gets elected it becomes the entire purpose and focus of the other party to be sure that he (or she) fails. How will we ever make any progress that way? We must be Americans first, not Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives. Our republic was founded and survived on compromise. How I long for a system that would value and respect every single life and reject all violence. The great American spirit–that founded this nation out of the wilderness, rose to world prominence, fought for human rights around the globe, defeated Hitler, landed a human being on the moon–is still with us. Surely we can use it to find our way out of this political quagmire we have allowed to swallow us.
President Lincoln said it best in 1861, but he could have been talking to us today: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
We must begin to work together or we will surely fall apart…
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