Pulse Wave Background Original Vector Illustration

By Joshie Jaxon

There’s no Pulse! Rally the community! Clear!

Still no Pulse! Try again! Don’t you dare quit on me! Clear!

Call it. Time of death, 2am.

Wait! We lost the pulse, but the body is still alive.

That’s not possible.

It is. The community is recovering, and getting stronger. We’ll get the Pulse back.

Greetings, geek fans. As you know, I’m not much for politics, and find them to be a bothersome, if not counterproductive, aspect of our world. I try to avoid them as much as possible, but given the recent tragedy that hit close to our community, I don’t think I can keep myself out of this one. A gunman took out fifty lives, and people are losing their minds over it. I don’t blame them. If that happened here, I’m sure I’d feel more for the situation than I already do, and I’m not a very emotional person as it is.

However, I’ve noticed that rather than focusing on those lives, people are instead focusing on the one who took them, and using this incident to push their own agenda about it. I told Bri Bones just the other day that this is going to become a measuring stick that people will bring out when they want to make a point; “It’s the worst shooting since…” All that will adhere to time is the event itself, much like September 11^th, Sandy Hook, Columbine, etc. People know what happened and where, but not how many lives, or even the name of a single victim. That’s the reality we live in.

Back to agendas, I saw a post this morning that was titled “What if someone had shared Jesus with the Orlando killer?”, and that’s what got me thinking about the selfishness of people as a whole. All these people want is to have a headline that will create controversy, and get people spouting their opinions, without actually having read the content.

What religion a person does or doesn’t have is irrelevant. This person took the lives of fifty people. Those people will never get to have their dreams realized. They’ll never be the author/baker/dancer they wanted. They won’t get to have children. They won’t get to find the love of their life. They won’t get to see their nieces or nephews grow up. Everything they had been building their lives towards was taken in an instant, and can never be returned. It sickens me that someone could hate a group so much that they would snuff out the lives of its members.

People are calling for more gun control, and stopping things like this from happening, but it doesn’t solve the problem at its source. Why can’t we all just accept people as they are, and as long as they aren’t doing anything that harms our lives, let them be? Oh, right, because that doesn’t generate revenue or ratings. People being kind to one another can’t be sensationalized by the media. Controlling the weapons doesn’t stop the people that want to use them, it just forces them to find a different method to attack us.

I’m part of a community that can be gunned down simply for existing. How is that right? I know that I try to keep my head down, and not make a target of myself, but the reality that I could get shot for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, frightens me. Not so much that I’m not going to continue to live my life, but that’s something that has been added to my mind as something to be aware of. I don’t like that this is the world I live in. Though perhaps I always have, and I’m just more aware of it now.

At any rate, people only care about things that they can relate to. The only way to get the conservatives/Republicans to care about gun violence is if a Klan meeting were shot up by a group of extremist homosexuals or transgender individuals. You can bet money that they would care about restricting access to such weapons if they were the ones on the receiving end of the violence.

Whatever the case may be, this isn’t problem that’s going to go away anytime soon. People need to be taught to respect others, even if they don’t agree with them. Do what you want, but harm none isn’t a bad way to live. It’s the way I live my life, and it has worked well for me so far. I’ll continue to try and bring a little joy to the world, and hope that you continue to enjoy every moment of your life, before someone else decides that it’s no longer worth living.