“The deadliest mass shooting in modern American history”
Here is a sentence served saturated in horror, leaving only discomfort, bewilderment, and emptiness. At the "Las Vegas Life Is Beautiful Festival," a title that will now be defamed in ironic infamy, Stephen Paddock, equipped with 23 guns, senselessly ended the lives of 53 human beings while causing injury to 500 others.
Recently, detailed information has been revealed regarding his anti-social behavior and unusual preparations leading up to the massacre. Investigators have spent days unpacking years of this murderer's life in the hopes of finding some connection, some reason, some explanation as to why life, in his mind, was deemed expendable. Such a search is futile.
Man has reigned superior on earth not because of our physical strength and capabilities. Animals reign supreme in that distinction. Humans rank highest on the social order because of our complex brains, in which cognition, learning, and thinking transpires. With our brains we are able to use logic, reason, and complex emotions as tools toward survival. However, the same strength we possess as higher thinking beings is also our most debilitating weakness.
Expending time and effort to dissect the inner workings of this murderer’s psyche can be helpful to a degree by formulating a small sense of understanding. Nevertheless, as more clues are divulged and more secrets revealed, the wormhole of unrest and pain grows deeper, thickening while the tragedy that took place remains unremedied.
What is crucial in this juncture is to put continued emphasis on the lives that were lost, because raising the volume of the voices of the living and telling heartfelt stories of loved ones will allow their deaths to not be reduced to numbers and percentages. More so, volumizing their lives will hush the horrifying clamor of hatred and violence reverberating still from the shots fired from Paddock’s guns.
I don’t want to remember the heartbreaking drone of deadliest mass shooting with it’s heavy sunken footsteps dragging down the masses and silencing forever the tragic lives lost.
No.
I want to remember the enduring, hopeful melody of Life is Beautiful.
Life is beautiful.
Don’t let that be forgotten.
