You ready to save your own life?

No promises but a question that could change it.

Do you like the ways you spend your days? Do you have something scheduled next week, next month, or next year you want to stay alive for? Do you have someone or a bunch of people you like being around? Hold that thought please, through the rest of this dispatch.

I recently fell in love. I don’t talk about it in my work, because it’s not my work. However, it has altered it and lent a new urgency to how I approach the action that could protect it.

Make no mistake, the work of understanding the stories and media that make the culture we all have to live in affects you and the people you love.

I am telling you this because our Supreme Court upheld a ruling that allows the selling of a formerly banned product to be added to another product. That product takes a semi-automatic gun and makes it shoot faster and continuously. It is not for hunting animals, because you wouldn’t have an animal left. It’s for hunting people.

My love hunts. So does his family. I have no issue with the fact that we will own guns. I am used to this. I am not afraid of this.

I am afraid that you will hear the call to anger and outrage and the ceaseless call to arms and freeze. You will hear about Kari, who worked the Las Vegas concert event with her three-month-old and hid praying that her infant son would not cry so that the coward shooting round after round with his unbanned bump stock product attached to his gun would not kill her son and her. This might make you go cold inside. You might remember the deadly night all those people were hunted and killed and make it a fantastic nightmare that won’t affect you. A bad dream, instead of the reality you live in.

You might think you do not have the fifteen minutes to locate your representative and tell them to support legislation that will federally ban bump stocks through the House and Congress. That’s all you have to say, by the way, if you are overwhelmed.

It’s going to be a rough couple of months and possibly years as the majority of Americans who want safety regulations realize over and over again that there is a massive business and profit incentive to stop federal regulations from taking dangerous, human-killing products off the market.

You need to stay soft and mentally resilient to this reality.

This has been a publication on American stories that shape our normal lives. Those everyday lives are left defenseless against domestic terrorists who can access products that help them enact terror faster.

It has been made clear to us that this Supreme Court and our lawmakers have privileged profit over people. The freedom of the few to make money in ways that statistically endanger many.

In light of this, you have to stay in the game of resisting this priority. You are not going to do it endlessly raging. You are going to do it by focusing hard on what you love and who you love and what calls, emails, and conversations you can produce to make clear your priorities.

I can’t, as I said, make promises. But I can tell you that there are people alive today who would not be, getting birthday cupcakes and celebrating weddings and graduations and just coming home from school, because their governments said their lives mattered more than the profit of products that are used to kill humans.

You are not going to be saved by the Supreme Court or Congress or one single president on accident. You are not going to have the right to life, liberty, and happiness because a bunch of companies and sellers decided that mattered more than their bank accounts. This is not crazy, this is how it has always been. Many Americans have always been asked to live with less freedom than others for their financial enrichment. And we know how to change that because it is our story. We’ve done harder things, like end slavery and get votes.

If you live to see federal protections, it will be because the majority of us, the people who outnumber the small group of people who make these decisions, demanded it.

We were supposed to be discussing the first two episodes of CLIPPED by Hulu today. But, 120 people will die today due to gun violence perpetrated by themselves and others. Instead, I am giving you links because this is breaking news and a way to not feel paralyzed. Frame this issue as a loving gesture of protection for your people. These links take less than three minutes to process.

If you want to know why this Trump-era federal ban came about in the first place

If you want to know what is the solution to this

If you want to email or call your Rep and say you want a federal ban on bump stocks

If you want to stay updated on simple solutions you can save this page

We have been asked to live with the potential threat of domestic terror so a small group of men can get second yachts and third vacation homes in Florida.

What do you want to do about that?

The background story of this case will be on the podcast this Sunday. At the 12-minute mark of this video below, the amazing Joy Wood sings MY DAYS. I take encouragement where I can get it and that happens to be found in the earnest, belty songs of musical theater like this one. The music video recording of this is powerful in its way. How we spend our days, as Annie Dillard tells us, is how we spend our lives. May yours be long and loving and hopeful.