“God Bless America.” Those words really resonate with me right now.

These are words once said out of jubilee in appreciation of the freedom that comes with being an American. Whether you believed in a God or not, it was a way to express your awareness of the great nature of your coveted life. You were American and that was something to be proud of.

You were a son or daughter of the very product of enlightenment, and tool in its ever-changing progression to the wills of those who inhabit it. When spoken you felt as though the world could hear you say it, and they would be envious for we are truly the blessed among all nations! “God Bless America.” Oh, how you heard it ring.

Perhaps it is the time in which I live and the circumstances that have befallen our nation, or perhaps I have simply matured and gained a new vision of a world I live in, but today these words hold a different meaning in my heart. No longer are the words spoken out of pride and gratitude but in a much more literal sense of the term. To say “God bless America” has become a plea and prayer to the one true God that he may pity and bless our broken family.

In Washington, and in the streets of America, men and woman rush to dawn their colors and claim ideological comrades often without knowing or questioning those very ideologies they liken themselves to. I would say people have been marching, but in today’s light, I would say it much more resembles parading. Needing often an occasion to walk out of school, or walk out of work, or walk out of whatever mundane activity you were stuck in so that you can make your funny sign and smash a few windows all in the name of your right to speak your mind. Whether it carries sincerity and earnestness with it or not.

The debate on gun control rages on and burns as bright as it may ever have. In light of the most current tragedy at Stoneman Douglas High School where a student opened fire on his classmates killing 17 and injuring 17 more, we have seen for the first time the lobbying by students for gun control legislation.

Walkouts have been called for at every high school in the nation as well as the March for Life which took place in nearly every city calling for varying forms of gun control. In response to this and every other movement, we see the emergence of opposition nearly as fervent in their position of the second amendment as those taking to the streets. The only similar theme present in each groups doctrine would be the blatant inability to compromise even in the most minor way, and an unwillingness to consider the thoughts and reasons of another unlike themselves.

I understand inconsolable sorrows of the families, friends, and communities to anyone who has been affected by gun violence and I do pray for them all. However, today my worries are greater as I see camps of enmity forming in America. How, I wonder, can we be strong in combating the problems of our nation if we habitually divide ourselves based on what politicians tell us we ought to believe, so long as we vote their way.

How can we console each other in times of need if we believe that this person is responsible for mass shootings because he is a gun owner and this person is threatening my freedom because they take to the street to march?

Why is it that we only have the one question? Should we limit or abolish the second amendment? And why is this largely believed to be a yes or no answer? The world has never been black and white before and why should this one issue be?

America is a free nation. Contrary to false perception, freedom is not a safety blanket that protects us. Freedom is the lack of such regulations that would constrict this land and its peoples. Freedom roams and encounters dangers, it is dealt great hardships and is aided by no one who is not willing.

America is a land ruled by the people, the common man who suffers or thrives in equal opportunity to his fellow Americans. We were founded on this principle that we shall govern ourselves and therefore be responsible for ourselves and our communities. Freedom is the wild stallion that knows it is better to live among the wolves than to live like the donkey who has traded his life and labor for a bucket of oats a day and a fence to show him his limits.

I consider myself a supporter of the second amendment and believe that those basic rights written down by our founding fathers were conceived under the notion that a people must be armed with every tool at its disposal to combat tyranny. Not just in the forms of weapons but in the form of our system of government.

Every device is created out of the intention of limiting power and yet we have this debate on strengthening our government because we find freedom burdensome. To those who believe this, that our freedom has become a burden on you, I remind you that freedom does not promise you anything. Freedom will not promise you safety and freedom will not promise you a job, or an education, or a free trip to the doctor.

Freedom only promises that the system will not exploit you as the farmer exploits the donkey who has become lethargic in its servitude to a higher power receiving only enough to stay alive.

A disease has swept over this country. A disease that makes free men and women believe that they should not have to be responsible for their own lives, that whatever their failings are, whatever tragedy has befallen them, it is the responsibility of the government to fix.

That the government has some magic wand that will make all of our problems disappear. We spend perhaps 90% of our time mocking our representatives as incompetent, unqualified, or just downright corrupt, and then at the very next hurdle, we find ourselves presented with we beg them to take that burden from us. The burden of freedom. How moronic can we be?

We must begin to realize that there is a greater responsibility in our own lives as individuals, as a community, society, and as one of the greatest civilizations to have ever been born of this earth. If a member of your community is murdering his fellow classmates with an AR-15 then you should find out why this has happened. How did you as students allow your classmate to be treated?

How as adult beings are we raising our children? How in this day and age can we be so absent from the lives of one person that we would not be aware of someone’s torment to the point of violence? Not once have I have I heard the story of the boy who committed this horrible crime. In no way am I vindicating him of such a heinous act, but I wonder how he came to be a monster and no one saw it coming?

No one has yet made the connection that the incessant bullying, ritual alienation in every school, and a home life of poverty and parental abuse may incite people who feel powerless to do something that makes them feel powerful. Sometimes at the cost of taking the lives of those who made them feel powerless

I have not heard one of those students who has taken on the role of politician present, a real assessment of the school environment they live in. We cannot fix what is a growing social issue of children feeling compelled to kill one another by addressing bump-stocks and magazine capacity. Whether this person had a bump stock or not you cannot deny that the members of that school and that community harbor responsibility for allowing hate to grow among them. And there is no piece of legislation that Congress could ever pass that can police how we love and how we hate. We must be responsible for at least that.

Like most of you, I don’t have a grand solution that I can place before you and say here it is! We have done it! But I do hope that we can start with this. If we as a society have deemed that we are no longer responsible for our lives and the lives of our community, that the government is somehow going to champion social issues, then we do not deserve our guns and we do not deserve to call ourselves a free people.

While we have the power to give all that up, to give to the government our rights because we find the uncertainty of our world and the fluctuation of our prosperity too frightening, I pray that we may relearn the value of what it means to be free and the responsibilities and uncertainties that come with it.

Until then I pray, God bless America!