My heart is broken from the loss of Deandre Kpana-Quamoh, an 18-year-old track star in my own neighborhood accidentally shot and killed at a party by some kids who thought it would be cool to bring out a gun. And my heart is broken by my friend's husband who took his own life a few weeks ago, fueled by anti-depressants and deep confusion.
My heart is broken alongside the hearts of millions of other Americans and people all over the world.
It's too many. It's too awful. It's too frequent and too routine.
My job is to help people take better care of their bodies, but that is a difficult thing to do when we are all walking around with broken hearts. So I can't write about fitness on this particular day. I can't write about wellness without acknowledging the cruelty and heartache that seems to wash over us in ever more frequent waves: shootings, violence, anger between neighbors, and unmitigated rage on the roads.
I don't understand. I don't know where it all began, but I do know that with all of this rage oozing up from underneath, it's too easy to get a gun—and too easy to walk into the line of fire while going about our daily lives.
There is no place in our homes for assault weapons, and there is no reason anyone with a history of violence or mental instability should be able to walk into any old store on any old day and buy a gun, especially one designed to obliterate huge numbers of human beings in mere seconds.
I probably shouldn't bring this up. It's probably not a good idea for my career. I wrote a post about guns and playdates a while back that went viral and was warned by several people that I should be careful associating myself with controversial issues like this if I want my book to have broad appeal. By speaking my mind, I will lose some people who might otherwise be interested in what I have to say about health and wellbeing. But this is a health issue, an urgent one, and I simple can't shut my mouth about it.
We can't take care of our bodies if we don't have living bodies to take care of, and we can't take care of our kids' bodies if they are riddled with bullets on campuses, street corners, and in nightclubs. We need our bodies, free of bullet holes, to breathe and move and rejoice.
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| Orlando Vigil in Nashville, TN 6/12/16 (via Nancy VanReece) |
Truth being the word of the day.
Truth. 91 Americans die every day from gun violence; 7 of them children. Truth. America's gun murder rate is 25 times higher than that of other developed countries.
Truth. We need universal background checks, common sense gun law reform, limits on the sale of automatic and semi-automatic guns and ammo, and pervasive gun storage and safety education for people licensed to own and carry. Truth. We need to elect politicians who are willing to enact the laws we need to keep our families safe, and we need to categorically reject the representatives who won't.
There is a groundswell of people working on this, and joining them has kept me sane through these tragedies piling up on top of the other. You can find more information here: Moms Demand Action or here, Everytown for Gun Safety.
Find your local chapter; donate to politicians who are brave enough to take a stand; and vote like your life depends on it, because it might. And then go home and tuck your kids into bed. Shield them until they can't be shielded any more from the heartbreak. Teach them to treat their own bodies and the bodies of everyone around them with loving kindness, and hope like hell that they don't end up at the wrong movie theater or in the wrong classroom at the wrong time.
May we all find a better way, someday somehow, to handle these fragile broken hearts of ours.
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