‘Enough’ was a long time ago, but we wait

through heart and mind, but also all the tiny joys, the little pleasures, the small and not-so-small rituals, that give those processes meaning. The nihilist holds that nothing means anything. That’s why he — almost always “he” — can gaze upon people in a bar, at the movies, going to class, enjoying a concert, worshipping God and see only targets.

“Life is boring,” the shooter wrote, “so why not?”

But life — does this really need saying? — is not boring. That night alone, in that place alone, life was flirting and fellowship and dance, raucous laughter and quiet forgiveness, the clinking of glasses and making of plans, arguments about sports and politics, people being there for one another, there with one another, in tiny joys, little pleasures and rituals small and not so small.

This shooter, like every shooter, killed whole universes of meaning and possibility.

In arrogant disregard of its own bloody truths, America gives the power to do that to virtually every adult. And that power has been used so frequently that many of those in the Thousand Oaks killing field turned out to be survivors of another killing field, the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. One of the Vegas survivors, Telemachus Orfanos, died.

So we are now a nation where mass shootings happen often enough that some people experience more than one. Yet we are told that what we should fear is a caravan of migrants walking through Mexico?

No. What we should fear is the arrogant disregard that will allow yet another massacre to pass without any legislative action to take guns from those who should not have them.

Sunday night, the Los Angeles Lakers and Atlanta Hawks took to the court wearing T-shirts that said “Enough.” But “enough” was a long time ago. We wait in carnage for our “leaders” to recognize this. We wait for sanity. We wait for ceasefire. We wait.

And whole universes die while we do.