Another shooting. More rampage. This time the death toll being the highest ever recorded in the United States. What’s it going to take to prevent this from happening over and over again like it has been in recent years? And when are people going to wake up and realize there’s a serious problem going on?
Reporters and various “people of knowledge” continue to state there isn’t any increasing trend to these mass shootings, but I honestly don’t believe that. It seems like every week now there is someone, somewhere, picking up a gun and going on a school campus, or in a mall, or at some business, or in this case a nightclub in Orlando and opening fire, killing innocent people.
This time fifty people had to die for no reason, all in the walls of The Pulse nightclub and all for what? Because no one knows what to do to prevent this from happening?
There’s a growing amount of spiritual sickness happening in our country. People are turning away from having any type of Higher Power and instead looking to technology, science, medicine, and various addictions for that. And the more people disengage from the world into any of those things, the more they seem to become susceptible to darkness and darkness-based behaviors that range from domestic violence, burglary, sexual crimes, and even things as extreme as mass shootings. I know that many believe that gun control is the answer for all this. But I don’t, because that’s something that happens after the fact. In other words, it’s not getting to the source of where it’s all starting.
Take this family I saw at the Cheesecake Factory about a week ago who were out for an afternoon meal. While there, the parents spent the entire time engrossed in their social media on their phones, while their kids played games on their own as well. And many of those games were just glorifying violence all the more. When I was a kid, there wasn’t any of this going on at meals. I was forced to interact with others at a dinner table or at social engagements. And I learned through this a few lessons here and there about loving and respecting others. But people don’t seem to care about that as much anymore or about anyone else except themselves these days. And the more they keep on living in this way, the more they are only going to make themselves susceptible to living more in darkness.
The last thing I could ever imagine myself doing nowadays is shooting someone and taking their life-force away. But I must say that in my worst moments in life, when I was deep into the craziest of my addictions, I had many thoughts about wanting certain people to die and even at one point, I almost pushed someone I loved down the stairs in a fit of rage, all because I had almost totally fallen away from seeking a Higher Power and living with unconditional love in my heart.
So while it may appear to be a stupid thing to others who read this, I still hold fast to my belief that the problem with this growing mass violence is due to an increasing spiritual sickness and lack of love going on between all of us. And while people may say this person had some type of allegiance to a terrorist group, the real question is not why, but how they ended up there in the first place. Were they raised with a lack of love and kindness to all human beings. Or were they raised with hatred instead.
The answer is with us people. We must begin to love everyone no matter what, unconditionally, even when our brains say certain people or types of people don’t deserve it. Maybe if we all started working on that, people wouldn’t be sliding through the cracks as much and falling away from God. And maybe then, we might start seeing a decrease in these mass shootings, once and for all…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson