Blood pools around the bodies, fresh victims of a tragic soul’s misguided choice. Vegas, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook…

What message is there to send that humanity should not only hear, but mourn as well? Life is a great, bloody, mysterious tragedy, is that it? To live in this world, the only one we know, is a cruel curse…is that really it?

Adding to the sentiment, to the suffering, is a questionable solution. Then again, maybe it’s true that a step back must be taken to gain a bit of leverage before forward progress can be made. But what of the sacrificed? This is the question that cannot be overlooked.

What of the humanity lost in this grand gesture? Is not the only certainty in life the present moment? Why kill today when we all may die tomorrow?

And what is more valuable than the potential for redemption in even the most accursed tormentors? God, salvation, eternity…these are dreams and hopes and possibilities, but humanity…humanity is a certainty. It is a powerful thing, one which can exact the most unthinkable, and it seems to be the most valuable potential we might ever know in this world.

Why then take revenge? and end all hopes of redemption? No point is made to the accused, for they are gone, lost to whatever may exist beyond this life. Only the innocent loved ones are here to suffer their losses…and suffer they do.

Why extinguish the thing that brings this world any meaning? Without humanity, the world is a most impressive machine…but with, it becomes more. It becomes an idea. It becomes a broken placeholder which might be fixed, molded into a future we create, a future which may not even exist. Tragic though the world may already seem, the greater tragedy would be to see the only inquisitive, caring creatures lost too soon due to the crimes of a select few.

For every murderer, for every liar, every bully, every hateful, corrupt, racist, evil individual…there is a kind, gentle, caring, selfless, understanding, charitable counterpart, and there are countless others who fall in the balanced middle that equates essentially to apathy. They do not ease the despair. They simply acknowledge its existence. They are hardly better than the dark souls who take the lives of others because they feel that they were deprived of theirs.

Many believe in a strange notion that humanity is doomed to repeat an endless cycle of selfishness, that we are all prone to corruption in the end, that if we haven’t fixed ourselves by now, we never will. I wonder what gods among us told them it was too late to change the state of things, for in my eyes, it is only dawn. There is time to do better. There is time to inspire better.

There is time to make amends. There is time to apologize to the wronged; there is time to look in the mirror and hate the face that looks back, and there is time to forgive the hate we’ve spread so that we might be able to appreciate how far we’ve come. There is time to hug your would be killer. There is time to shake the hand of your would be victim. There is time. Don’t fucking waste it.