no words

In the face of the horrors of these past few days – hate-crime shootings in Buffalo and in southern California – I find myself with no words to express the fear, the sadness, the utter despair at what our country seems to have become. The fact that so much hate exists, still, after all that we thought we had accomplished, is nothing short of mind-numbingly awful, a seemingly downwardly spiraling vortex of pain.

I guess that I’ve found the words.

Like others in my generation, I never thought we’d be at a place in our lives where America the Beautiful is not a given. Where the simple act of shopping for groceries or worshipping on Sunday is riddled with the fear of losing one’s life – all because of an unstemmed hatred flourishing beneath the surface and yet again showing its fiercely ugly face in incidents large and national-news worthy or smaller and equally terrible.

But I’ve got to believe.

I’ve got to believe in words like faith and light and change. I’ve got to believe that those souls who died for nothing more than looking different will somehow move us all to affect a cure. I’ve got to put my heart in a place where it trusts that good will triumph over evil.

And so, dear readers, on a day like this, I hope you will forgive a blog post that is heavy with the shared grief of our current events. Light-and-funny is just not in my heart or my words today, but a never-ending hope is – because without it I fear that we are lost.

Hope for the better. Hope for the brighter. Hope for us all.

One word. Hope.