"Love is love is love is love is love."

We have had so much going on lately.  We have celebrated Amelia’s second birthday, gone to Atlanta for the weekend, watched my favorite awards’ show of every year - The Tony’s, and I finished up another school year.  I had plans to write about those things.  To share with you, readers, what it feels like to celebrate and mark another year of Amelia’s life and the absolute joy that has come with that, to ramble endlessly about my Hamilton obsession as well as my obsession with all things musical, describe Amelia’s first baseball game in the sweltering Atlanta heat and to reminisce about the school year with emotion that can only be brought about by the first day of summer break.  My plans changed.  You will still read about all of those things (I hope), but for now, I cannot allow myself to write with anything other than heartbreak.

On Saturday night, well, technically, Sunday morning, fifty people were violently murdered as they danced.  More were injured.  Let me say that again – as they danced.  Not as they fought, as they argued or even as they protested and not that their actions, whatever they were, would justify this massacre – as they danced. These were people having fun, being who they were, and living their lives.  I could say that they were someone’s daughter, son, friend, father, mother, cousin, co-worker, etc, etc, etc, and that is true, but what should matter to us, above all else, is that they themselves were someone. 

I could complain about gun regulation, mental health problems, terrorism, and any number of other “explanations” we want to give, but what I see in this is hatred.  Yes, all of those things are problems, but hatred is what spurred this.  This should be undeniably and unequivocally unacceptable.  And yet…

I know that no sane person would claim that they wanted this to happen.  Perhaps, no one would admit, even to themselves, that by not being a part of an active solution, they are perpetuating the problem.  I am not pointing fingers at people or at specific solutions.  I don’t know how we fix this.  But I do know that we are called to fix it.  We cannot continue this way.  We cannot raise our children in a world where hatred is this commonplace.  I will not do it. 

I am tired and I know you are too.  I’m tired of being inundated with stories of violence in so many public places, in so many homes, of rape behind dumpsters on college campuses with the perpetrators not being held responsible, of politicians who will say whatever it takes to get a reaction, of misguided and vocal groups of people and of hatred, in its many forms. 

I do not know how to solve all of our society’s problems and I am definitely not the most eloquent writer, but I do know that love is the answer and above all else, love is active.  Love is not a passive statement, but a way of life. 

Loving others does not mean we can pick and choose which people to accept, to comfort, to protect.  Love means accepting and respecting all in their lives and not just their deaths. Love means choosing the battles that truly matter. Love means actively teaching our children love, in all of it’s forms.  Love means that we work for change, rather than just changing our status on social media.  Love means standing together, to make each other stronger, to help each other keep going.  Love is remembering those we have lost, those who suffer, the families who face a new “normal,” the outcasts, the confused, the angry, the hurting, our neighbors, our families, our children and ourselves.   Lin-Manuel Miranda, so eloquently said in a timely sonnet/acceptance speech, “love is love is love is love is love.”