We must win with love, compassion and community

We’re living in a pivotal time. Despite the pandemic’s demonstration to us of our interconnectedness, we continue to see the world as if we were cowboys in some Old West movie: Don’t tell me what to do, don’t take away my rights, I’m out to take care of myself and to hell with everyone else! The evolutionary step we need to take is to see all people in the world as our family — we are all part of the same community, and we need to take care of each other. It’s time to move beyond the “What’s in it for me?” mentality and ask ourselves, “How can I better understand myself and my fellow human beings so we can live in peace together?”

If you’re a gun owner and you agree we need to ban assault weapons, raise the age of legal gun ownership and strengthen background checks, it’s time for you to speak up. We know from studies that people who live with handgun owners are more than twice as likely to be fatally shot. Living with a handgun owner particularly increases the risk of being shot to death in a domestic violence incident (especially for women), and there’s “zero evidence of any kind of protective effects” from strangers entering a home, according to an Annals of Internal Medicine study at Stanford University.

There is an antidote to this craziness: love. In our “cowboy culture” that values individual strength and beating “the bad guys,” we can present to the world a different kind of strength: the power of love, compassion and community. Both the bad guy and the good guy exist inside of each of us — it’s just a question of which of those guys you wish to be!

Christina Hildebrandt

Longmont