The unbearable is now routine

This season of purple fragrance will now also forever be marked by the memory of 19 schoolchildren and two of their teachers gunned down by a maniacal teenager in Texas just days after an 18-year-old gunned down Saturday shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo.

The season of lilacs is now a season of violence and tears, a season of funerals scheduled in grim succession, a season of “not this all over again” when the only thing that really makes sense is a collective promise of “not this, not ever again.”

But that’s not the America we live in.

The unthinkable is now expected.

The unbearable is now routine.

If, like me, you love lilacs, you swoon through the brief moment when the woody plants show off their delicate blooms. Raise your hand if you have snuck into a neighbor’s yard to clip a cluster for your breakfast table. Raise your hand if you’ve ever stopped in your tracks to close your eyes and just take in the aroma. Raise your hand if you are struck by how this annual explosion comes as both a reassurance and a shock to your senses.

I know I’m not alone. But I also know that we tend to forget the splendor of lilacs when the delicate flowers fade and then fall. Out of sight, out of mind — until they return once again to overload our circuitry.

In that sense, the season of lilacs and the never-ending cycle of violence have something in common. We react to what we see. Our disbelief at the horror of Minneapolis or Buffalo or Uvalde seems all-consuming until its urgency fades or is focused on the next outrage.

This is natural. We can’t expect our anger and grief to stay dialed up on high in perpetuity. But we as a nation need to figure out how to meet this constant tempo of gun violence with an even more constant drumbeat of demands for something better.

With the current makeup of the Senate, this is a bit like asking a dark and ugly cloud to turn and retreat. Rage won’t help. Negotiations are laughable. The GOP is more interested in protecting the right to bear arms than the right to live in peace.

But isn’t that the nature of faith? To believe in that thing that might seem impossible and act as if the combination of prayer and perseverance could make a difference? Isn’t that what you do when lives are on the line? Isn’t that what you do to protect the babies who cannot protect themselves against the sad and pathetic men who buy assault rifles when they turn 18? Isn’t that what you do when you desperately hope that the people who are sworn to protect and to serve will look at your Black and brown children and see possibility instead of menace? Isn’t that what you do when the majority of people who live in the land you call home actually support sensible gun laws and some kind of police reform?

So, whatever you are feeling this week — don’t run from it. Don’t shove it into a hidden space. Sit with it, because the universe is telling you that this kind of violence — against children, against unarmed Black men, against the psyche of a nation — is unacceptable. Figure out how to hold on to that righteous anger over senseless death when the stories of lost lives and the images of little coffins start to subside.

Fifteen years after the massacre at Virginia Tech, 10 years after the Sandy Hook rampage, four years after the carnage in Parkland, Fla., we have yet to see serious bipartisan efforts at gun reform.

It is easy to think that nothing will change. I fight this sentiment myself, and claim as a mantra something I spotted during lilac season last year, when I visited what is now called George Floyd Square in Minneapolis with my young adult children. Posted on a pole near the spot where Floyd was murdered, a sign read: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world and you have to do it all the time. If not now, when? If not me, then who?”

The GOP lawmakers and the gun rights crowd are counting on our exhaustion. Let’s surprise them.