Invitation to a Cemetery

("Maine Shootings")

What value the life of a human being?

What price, what cost?

While we watch in agony the unfolding tragedy elsewhere, we have become hardened to the brutal reality of death on our own doorstep.

Lewiston Maine will soon join the ranks of dozens of other towns and cities in this nation. In the near future, just another name scrawled on the wall as we struggle to recall specifics of what transpired there on that terrible October day. When the world abruptly and violently ended for eighteen in a bowling alley or a bar.

How can it be that we accept that this kind of horrible conclusion, is coin of our realm? In for a penny, in for the sights and sounds that accompany the indiscriminate firing of an AR-15, an invitation to a cemetery.

There are those among us who stand as accessories before the fact. For while we have this conversation on endless loop, it always ends as it did before.

The inescapable conclusion is that the price paid for our obsession with guns is our compassion, our humanity, our soul.

Leaving us morally bankrupt.