Today, we talked to our one daughter and grandchildren who live in Minneapolis three different times.
Every August, as yellow buses rumble back onto suburban streets, I post my outrage, then scroll to the next distraction. I own stock in companies that manufacture the very weapons I condemn. I vote for perfectly coiffed politicians who offer “thoughts and prayers” in cream-colored press releases while pocketing donations from lobbyists in wood-paneled rooms I’ll never enter.
Right now, parents are tucking Batman sheets around squirming bodies across America, their fingers lingering an extra second on small shoulders. Outside, the moon casts silver light on abandoned swing sets while I sit at my lap-top, wondering if absolute freedom and absolute safety can ever coexist in this fractured country. Baseball gloves with loosened laces will gather dust in garages while we debate abstract constitutional principles on glowing screens. Christmas lists will remain forever unwritten while I struggle to reconcile my belief in individual rights with the blood-soaked cost of those rights. I’m left questioning whether my own children’s, grandchildren’s, and great-grandchildren’s theoretical freedom is worth the warm, solid weight of someone else’s child, now gone.
Society has undergone profound changes that create something I call a behavioral contagion of ignorance. Minneapolis now faces the heartbreaking reality of over 70 homicides annually. The Minnesota murder rate has more than tripled, rising 240% since the 1950s when I was a child!
I know every morning mothers, including my four daughters and granddaughters, straighten little collars while their husbands zip up backpacks. I know their throats tighten with the unspoken question that haunts me too: Is today going to be Okay for my child? THIS CANNOT—WILL NOT—CONTINUE TO BE OUR REALITY. But then I look at my voting record. I look at my investment portfolio. What am I willing to sacrifice to change it?
Old Man Pondering 
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