EMPTY ROOMS

There are 17 empty bedrooms this morning that were full of life a week ago.

A week ago those rooms played music, heard secrets, listened to prayers, heard laughter, protected innocence and guaranteed safety.

They held brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, cousins, nephews, nieces, grandsons and granddaughters. Boyfriends and girlfriends.

And now they are the tombs of the soon to be forgotten.

Thoughts and prayers from mostly men who were directly responsible for their early graves got to do the one thing the one time inhabitants of those rooms can no longer do.

Breathe.

The Emperor of America, the King of Fools, who right out the gate  signed a bill that made it easier for that Florida based mentally ill assassin to buy the kind of weapon that can wipe out a war torn village in seconds, will begin his day by applying his make up like Glen Close in Dangerous Liaisons.   He will spend hours coiffing his hair just so and then spray on  layers of lacquer like an Aquanetted  housewife of the 1960s.    Then he will dress himself in clothes that were made by peasants for his signature label.

He will watch hours of TV, talk to it and dance in celebration circles,  pumping his fists in the air,  every time he hears his name and then, because he has to, he will slink down the hallway like a reluctant toddler to his office, to do the work that he despises and resents while he wonders out loud why the country can’t run itself.

Later, he will eat the very same happy meals  that the child ghosts of the now empty rooms surely would have ordered.

He will spend hours on the phone, gossiping with his bffs, feet dangling in the air,  just like the bullet shredded, mutilated victims would have done too.

At dinner, if he finishes everything, he will be rewarded with the biggest piece of chocolate cake for being the best boy ever.

At night, once he is tucked in by the hooker du jour or whoever has the keys to the back door of the White House,  who will do anything for a price, he will get to do the other thing that those 17 corpses can no longer do.

Dream.

We Americans are wired to survive.

To move on.  

To put unbearable pain in our rear view mirror while not getting that things reflected in our rear view mirror are much closer than they appear.

We are a pick yourself up by the boot straps kind of people, who stick a band-aid on our wounds and keep on trucking.

We are only temporarily tethered to each other for a few hours that follow a national tragedy.

Worse, our own, individual memories are designed to be selective.

The machinery in our deep space brains operates just like a soothing, fireside president or our sunshiney moms and dads, who, no matter how dire our circumstances, worked at a feverish pace to convince us that everything was going to be okay even when deep down inside we knew that they were giving their award worthy performances as best supporting parents.

We simply do not dwell in the house of remembering.

We escape as soon as we can.

We slam the door behind us and we don’t just lock it, we border it up.  No. We seal it. Tight.

In many ways our shared capacity for denial mirrors the very behavior that we abhor in our elected officials.

Especially the ones who got $30 million dollars from the NRA.

I am both an activist and a parent, which in some ways is the same thing.

I defend the rights, not only of my own children, but of yours as well.

Even though I’m a tv/film writer/playwright by trade,  I start my each and every morning, writing these blogs, hoping to surgically reach your brain via your hearts.

Evidently I seem to be failing, miserably.

My theory is, when your back is to the wall, you should do whatever it is you do best and apply it to a justifiable cause, like not allowing our children to die prematurely at the hands of an easy to flag, deeply sick boy who somehow had access to a military grade weapon.

I do my part.  But what do you do?

Do you hover in coffee shops and rant about how your leaders fail you?  Do you switch off MSNBC and turn on The Bachelor because you simply can’t take the pain?

Do you act exactly like those who you hate and do absolutely nothing?

Congress is complicit and are full of treasonous lowlifes who suck at the tit of the NRA.  We know that.  But what is your excuse?

Will you turn away from the faces of the teen glowing victims when they appear on the front page?

Will you even bother to read their names?

And yet you have already memorized the name of the mentally diseased assassin.

Everything that we do anesthetizes us.

TV anesthetizes us.

The Internet anesthetizes us.

Retreating from the cracks in our personal relationships anesthetizes us.

Not being able to pay our bills anesthetizes us.

All the drugs that they advertise on TV anesthetizes us.

Feeling broken and beaten down anesthetizes us.

Members of Congress, who are technically hired to do our bidding, anesthetize us.

Our preposterously incapable and misogynist, sexual predator president anesthetizes us.

War casualty news rather than being splashed across the front pages of our daily newspapers,   sits ignored, like the tomb of an unknown soldier, somewhere between the Jumbo puzzle and the comics.

We are, all, every single one of us, just like Michael Jackson who craved  an endless IV drip of mother’s milk to get him through the night.

Every single day that you do nothing, is another day that your hands are covered in the blood of America children who look, act and sound exactly like yours.

You know the gun fatality statistics better than you know the numbers of your home address and yet you will spend more time channel surfing and Amazon shopping than applying whatever it is you do directly to the problem.

I am a child of the sixties and therefore a revolutionary by trade.

When the Pentagon Papers were published and we found out that the government knew that we were fighting an impossible to win war, we came together and help bring down the heads of government to their knees.

This great country of ours was created as a direct and permanent response to tyranny.

We did not allow a despot to control our destiny.

Those of you out there who cite the second amendment as proof that owning guns is your constitutional right, have no idea what the amendment says. The second amendment says, ”A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

In the lobby of the NRA, that pesky first sentence has been eliminated.

Money controls our planet and worse,  the souls of most of our politicians and even worse, the fate of our babies.

1% of the world will decide who will live and who will die.

Millions of American men and women,  sons and daughters, fought and died on battlefields and on the bloody streets so that you can enjoy the freedoms that you enjoy and to not stand up and protect America, just like our founding fathers did, from the minority of men who want to deplete it’s resources so that they can eat their caviar and sail on their yachts is it’s own form of treason.

Those men are directly responsible for Sandy Hook.  For Orlando. For Las Vegas.  For Parkland.  For every single gun related death over the last twenty years, going all the way back to Columbine.

So the next time that you visit the ballet at the David Koch auditorium at Lincoln Center in New York,  take a moment to think whose temple you are sitting in.

And then begin to consider how ethical, moral and decent you really are.

Because from where I sit,  things do not go better with Koch.