We Handle Each Other So Violently

I was fifteen years old when Columbine happened.

I remember watching the news coverage with stunned disbelief, thinking it was an unspeakable tragedy, but also assuming it was an isolated one. If you had told me then that this moment would mark a beginning - a catalyst - that would ripple out into decades of violence in our schools, in our grocery stores, in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our very sense of safety, I would not have believed you.

But here we are.

This week alone, we have witnessed the loss of three dearly loved high school students, the brutal attack on a Ukrainian refugee woman in Charlotte, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Beyond our borders, the devastation in Sudan and Gaza reminds us that violence is not confined to any one people or nation. Yet what weighs heaviest on me is the reality here at home: that in a country that claims to be the “land of the free,” we cannot guarantee the most basic freedom of all - the freedom to exist in public spaces without fear of being the victim of a violent crime.

Theologian and activist Bernice King spoke a line that I keep replaying, “We handle each other so violently.” And it is true. Violence has become the rhythm of our days, the background noise we have learned to tune out until the next breaking headline forces us to look again.

I keep thinking about that fifteen-year-old girl in 1999 who thought violence was a shock, not a norm. I grieve what has been lost in the 26 years between her and me - the innocence, yes, but more than that, the collective willingness to imagine a world where children grow up without lockdown drills, where a concert or a parade or a church service isn’t a gamble with mortality. I grieve for the ignorance she lived in, not realizing just how many marginalized people had already been suffering at the hands of hate LONG before that April day in 1999.

It is exhausting. It is heartbreaking. It is unnecessary. And it is not inevitable.

The ideologies that have fueled this rampant and systemic hate are not sacred; they are not untouchable. They are choices. And choices can be unlearned, dismantled, reimagined. They can be laid to rest once and for all.

So here is my prayer today:

May we be brave enough to grieve what has been stolen,

angry enough to name the harm,

and tender enough to still believe in a better way.

May we lay down the weapons of ideology and fear,

and take up instead the daily, defiant work of love, empathy and hope.

Because love is not passive.

Love is not naïve.

Love is not willfully ignorant.

Love is the fiercest refusal to let violence write the final word.