Seeking The Right Words to Say in the Face of Tragedy

I’ve been looking through social media, television, and personal conversation to hear that one person say exactly what I need to hear to make sense of all of this. Some deeper spiritual meaning that someone else can bring to light to ease my troubled mind. I am deeply concerned about the fate of mankind and I am upset by the fact that something as horrible as mass murder keeps happening. There have been more mass shootings than days in 2017 in the United States.

Some twisted man murdered almost 60 people and wounded over 500 (that’s five…fucking…hundred, almost the size of my town’s high school) innocents that were attending a country music concert in Las Vegas, Nevada the night of October 1st. I can’t help but wonder, have the Gates of Hell been opened and this fucking horrible excuse for a human being is but some nightmarish creature that escaped from those firey pits? Is he someone that has been framed by unknown entities to incite and reinforce fear in the American people? It makes me want to vomit. Imagining that any concert I could’ve ever attended, something like that could have happened. How have things gotten that far out of hand that people are dying by the HUNDREDS from gun violence? Why do we all have this outrage every time something awful like this happens (which happens FAR TOO OFTEN) and then nothing gets changed? I go back and forth on gun restriction – I refuse to feed into the fear-based mentality that “the government is going to come around to our homes and try to take everything we have so we have to stock-pile guns to protect ourselves from them” but the more and more I see the less and less I trust them. Could this be a ploy to destroy our way of protecting ourselves should they come knocking? Or are we truly just a danger to ourselves?

What is the greater spiritual message to this? What perspective must I take to zoom out and notice the larger current that is moving through this time? Must it take something so violent to truly bring us together into love? Are we that blind…?

As I go inside, I think the message is this: we have come a long way to get to this point. There is only one direction to go and that is to LOVE. It is back into the energy of the God and the Goddess. It is to inspire a sense of conscious community into the very core of our beings. Indeed we are so blind. This is only a reflection of the fear and disconnect we have been reinforcing into our belief patterns for years. We shy away from people who obviously have a story to tell, like the man with a scraggly beard and stained clothes holding a cardboard sign on the street corner, or the cashier who seems to be deeply concerned about something in their life, or our neighbor that never seems to want to engage with other humans but looks like they desperately need a friend. Everyone is wondering what they can do to help prevent something like this from happening again. Well, you can ‘love thy neighbor’. You can leave a little extra tip for your stressed waitress or you can compliment someone on their smile. Maybe drop a business card off in the homeless man’s cup offering a job. You can take five extra minutes of your day to have a human connection with someone you would otherwise walk past pretending to be very engaged with whatever is on your cell phone. Stand in line at the checkout to talk to a real human instead of blowing through the kiosk. Show genuine compassion and interest in someone’s story.

The reason people do things like these is because they feel like their life is so unimportant, so meaningless, so helpless to their own fate that the one thing they believe they can control is mortality. To take the life and meaning out of someone else is their way of trying to make others feel as awful as they do. And it works. Their name is blasted all over the news, people look deeply into their lives and their patterns and their story…when before, no one gave a shit. If their one chance of creating a story for themselves that will be remembered is that they were a monster, well, they probably already felt that way about themselves before anyone else said it so what’s it matter if people say it after they’re dead anyways? That’s how they think. They want to inflict pain on others so they can be met at the same low vibration they live on.

And it’s not their fault.

It’s ours.

It’s our society’s fault for not nurturing and loving each other unconditionally… for not listening to their story sooner. When people carry such a heavy burden, with no support system to help lessen the load, there comes a point when the weight crushes them. Rational thought disappears. There is only enough space in the subconscious mind left for resentment, rejection, and regret. So that’s where they operate out of.

I just watched an incredibly thought-provoking Ted Talk (imagine that) on an EMT’s experiences with patient’s in their last minutes of life on this planet. Matthew O’Reilly was a career EMT and helped thousands of people in New York City and these moments were distinct.  He said that when he stopped lying to them, saying that they were going to live although it was clear their injuries or conditions were fatal, most of these people had peace and acceptance on their expression. What else he mentioned really stuck with me. He mentioned that there were three noticeable patterns in people’s last spoken words; one, that they wanted forgiveness and carried regrets. Two, that people wanted to know that they were significant and that their lives had meaning. And three, that they would be remembered.

Mass murderers are no exception to this common human condition. As hard as it is, we are being called to send more love to other humans that find themselves too oppressed by the energy of this dense place. The paradigm is laughable – the more love we send out, the less hate there is to be found. So, I believe the problem to be our society, which initiates the pattern of disconnect, that reinforces the feelings of loneliness and exile in individuals, that introduces violence as a coping mechanism and uses guns as a glorified and expressive way of loudly and violently making their screams heard for the first and last time. Many people share the thought that we shouldn’t give this guy the fame he was after. I agree, but to an extent. Here’s what they fail to realize - no one was there to listen to his story before all this. Attention is attention, regardless of its intentions.

The best thing we can do to help prevent another thing like this from happening again is also the easiest and most rewarding. It’s kindness. Compassion. Empathy. Generosity. The more we give, the more we receive and if we can help move one person into even a slightly higher vibration, by Law, only more of that can come. If you have ever noticed when, for example, one of your first customers of the day gave a generous tip or a really great conversation, and then that became a trend throughout the day with new people and interactions? Or, on the flip side, you “started your day off on the wrong side of the bed” and things only got worse from there? That is Law. The Law of Manifestation, the Law of Attraction, and the Law of Compassion at work. It is something many of us already know about; this isn’t new news. I’m asking you to think of it as a way for you to start a chain reaction of kindness for one individual your gut feeling tells you needs some extra love. Get creative! What do you have to lose? Well, to be blunt, it could be someone you love in the next mass shooting. I don’t encourage compassion out of fear – I encourage compassion for the sake of wanting to leave this world when your day comes knowing that every day you made a difference in raising at least one person’s vibration.

If you are still here reading this, I challenge you to take my message into your heart and see how it sits with you. Let us take responsibility for our separation, our indifference, and our inconsideration. Let’s start facing our own shadows, so that we can in turn shed light on someone else’s. Let’s be accountable for how we treat our fellow human beings. Encourage yourself, and your partner, and your children and your coworkers to hear someone out. Get someone the help they need if what they need is too big for you to help carry. Give the voiceless a chance to be heard before they become a villain out of spite. Love each other. Unconditionally, and passionately. A dear friend of mine once told me, “Angels are everywhere. Treat them as such.” You will never be able to know exactly what someone is going through until you give them the chance to speak it. This person you are talking to may be an angel in disguise, here to change the world… or you might be the angel that changes someone else’s. What side of the human evolution do you want to be on?

“Transformation begins in you, wherever you are, whatever has happened, however you are suffering. Transformation is always possible. We do not heal in isolation. When we reach out and connect with one another—when we tell the story, name the hurt, grant forgiveness, and renew or release the relationship—our suffering begins to transform.”

― Desmond Tutu, The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World