August 28th, 2025
I live in Minnesota, so the morning after a horrific tragedy I wasn’t surprised to open social media and see so much ugly. (A lot of this ugly coming from so-called Christians, who have spent the last decade showing all of us, including their Jesus, who they really are and what they definitely are not.)
Disappointed, always, but not surprised.
One of the most “interesting” takes (I put “interesting” in quotes because it’s meant to represent so many other words, like “ignorant” and “repugnant”) I’ve come across is about the identity of the shooter, and how they consider that identification to be a mental illness, and that if the shooter would have just had a nice, Christian upbringing, with two straight parents, who did not allow or accept that identity, that none of this would have happened at all. Oh, and that guns aren’t the problem, have never been a problem, in the only country where normalized mass shootings are a daily occurance that only require an acceptable portion of our thoughts and/or prayers to alleviate our preventable pain until the next one, which will be tomorrow, set your watches.
For fuck’s sake. The opposite is true, you guys.
Our goal should be to create a society where every single child knows how beautiful they are on the inside, how unique, how irreplaceable; a society that agrees, without exception, to keep those children (and all children) safe and to admit when things are not working towards those ends; a society that then makes significant steps to protect every life, the same lives where we’ve instilled the beliefs that every human is beautiful, unique, and irreplaceable.
A society in which every person has intrinsic value and we all know it.
If you have ever disparaged someone simply because of who they are on the inside, congratulations: you are the problem. Full stop. You are responsible for making a person or people feel less-than: less than beautiful, strange in the wrong way, completely disposable.
There are people who feel disposable.
It’s all lives, right? All lives matter? Some of you were chanting this to make a point that most of those chanting never meant in the first place.
Pro-life has nothing to do with a fetus. Pro-life means preserving the dignity and sanctity of every single breathing creature, from a minute to over a hundred years old.
It’s fucking bizarre, thousands of years into the human experiment, to have to waste my words to explain to everyone what you already know: this existence is magical and inexplicable and instead of embracing that and each other, we do it wrong most of the time.
Fuck that. I love you guys. My guy guys, my girl guys, my nonbinary guys, my animal guys. I had a heated discussion with one of my best friends late last night and he was so upset, but it made me feel good to see it, because the world is so upsetting right now and I felt less alone.
So do that. I rarely give advice; I’m a terrible role model. But go out, and make someone feel less alone. And maybe — just fucking maybe — you’ll feel a little less alone yourself.
The Den 