What if.

I used to get the biggest kick out of badgering the crap out of my high school best friend/freshman college roommate with "what if" questions. I'd love to share a few of the real gems with you, but sadly, there were none. Mostly they were just absurd and unanswerable and asked only to make her laugh but instead just made her roll her eyes and groan.

The "what ifs" in my head right now aren't funny. Oh, they're still absurd - because it's absurd to have to think about these kinds of things; they still feel unanswerable, but really, they are not. 

What if fewer guns really is the answer to how do we keep our children alive until they hit the mean streets of the real world? Until the end of the school day?

What if tighter regulations and some basic common sense would make a difference in the survival rate of our children as they come under attack by their peers? 

WHAT IF YOU'RE WRONG, and you could help change this, and you're just too close-minded and heels-dug-in stubborn to try? 

If it doesn't work, okay. If people are still violently, brutally murdered in seconds, and by the dozen, okay. You win. If the bad guys just shrug their shoulders and get creative and turn to machetes or monster trucks or slow cookers and the same level of mayhem still ensues, okay. If after a reasonable amount of time of trying what seems to work exceptionally well for every other developed and shithole country alike (even those with mentally ill people, and angry people, and cop haters, and racists, and extremists, and non-Christians), if it turns out we were wrong, we can come back to where we are now. 

What if it could be different? Better?   

The audacity of refusing to try. Something. Anything. Of suggesting that a better answer is more of the same. More guns. Of deciding that somehow my husband, my sisters, my friends, should be responsible for making the kind of decision law enforcement trains endlessly for, and in a panicked, confusing, loud, chaotic, terrified moment take it upon themselves to kill a child, because it should be their job to take care of it, not ours. 

The selfishness of being unwilling to ask yourself what an alternative might look like. 

The lack of humility in saying that your rights are greater than the rights of each of the people I say "I love you, have a good day" to every morning. That your rights were written out for you hundreds of years ago, so they can't change and we should stop talking about it, thank you very much. (Did you know there have been 27 amendments proposed by Congress and ratified by enough states to become part of the Constitution? That's 27 times we've said the original version either wasn't quite right or wasn't quite enough, so we made it better.) 

Be humble. Be audacious. Be selfless. Or just be ready to gloat and tell the rest of us we were wrong. Who really cares what your motivation is to impart, or at least allow for, change. 

What if your way of doing things is just. not. working. anymore. 

What if we take better care of each other.