it's all fun and games 'til you're picking brains up off the carpet


i was having a conversation with a friend from church a few weeks ago. they were telling me about a group of people, i can't exactly recall what church or organization they are connected with, who've taken it upon themselves an extraordinary ministry. i wish i could remember all the vitals of the conversation tonight. maybe, during the moment, the story seemed scary enough that i didn't want to hold onto all the gory details for the sake of my own peace of mind. anyway, if i remember half-correctly, the group has a contact within a local coroner's office or maybe just a well-placed ear to the ground. regardless, the job they have taken on is gruesome and grace personified all in one big ball of unconditional love. if the group hears of a suicide within their reach, they respond to the call and go to the affected person's home. there, they volunteer themselves to the family left behind to clean up the tragic scene after the police have done what they do. imagine the gift this must be. maybe it couldn't be fully comprehended or understood when the offer was made, but i think about a family who has lost a loved one whose life was so bloody hard or turned upside down that they chose death instead of life. the blunt trauma of the loss would be too much to take, in and of itself. "what could we have done?" "why wouldn't they let us help them?" "didn't they think about us?" "why, god, why???" the emotions, the guilt, the self-loathing would be too much to bear. add to that the physical mess left behind if the person committing suicide chose a gun as the weapon of choice to do the deed. carnage everywhere. literal bits of the shattered soul are all that is left behind, painting a canvas of terror for those forced to see it. cue this special group of people. a crew of angels on earth that have intentionally realized the impact of a suicide on a family. they understand the insult to injury cleaning up the remains of their lost love can be. and they take it on themselves to sanitize up the room. every bit. like it never happened. the emotional scars will be just enough, thank you very much. the physical ones they remove themselves.

amazing.

my guess is there are these types of groups all over our state, country, and world. that i wasn't aware of their existence only tells me that i am lucky to have never been forced to worry about it.

i have thought of this story and these types of groups a lot over the last two weeks.

i've thought about newtown, obviously, and "what it all means".

i've argued with friends and family about the impact of guns on our lives and our culture.

i've been saddened with the thoughts that, for many of those friends and family, they don't really want guns. they feel like they need them. to make them feel safe. to help them sleep at night.

what if someone broke in my home at night and wanted to hurt my family. not on my watch. not with my gun.

what if someone with a gun out in public was threatening the welfare of not only my family, but the innocent public? not on my watch. not with my gun.

that kind of paranoia makes me sad for them. it makes me sad for us as a country. that this is what it has come to. we are afraid of the hypothetical bogeyman. we realize the state of desperation that this "christian" nation of ours continues to perpetuate, and god love the desperate, but desperate is as desperate does. we fear what we don't feel like we can control, be that black scary people or scary disease or scary weather. and so we build our fortresses, both literal and figurative, against them all.

i don't want scary cancer again, so i take chemo, and while it beats the shit out of me, i must convince myself that the torment will keep the cancer away after my treatment. i get the fear, man. i do. the paranoia is strong with this one, too.

but what are we really afraid of? what rights are we so interested in preserving? who privileged us to only have to look out for number one? for those of us that go to church and are interested, like even one teeny bit, in the context of the four gospels, who the fuck have we let brainwash us into thinking the poor and the needy are the poor and the needy because they did it to themselves? what fairy tale world have we been raised in? what church has corrupted god's message of unconditional love? what part of "thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven" don't we understand?

buckle the fuck up, folks.

this shit is way past sad.

this is where we are. it's not a culture problem. it's a "me" problem. it's a "i am comfortable with my lot in life, no matter how fortunate my circumstances were compared to my brother on the other side of the tracks" problem. it's an "us" problem. it's a "we" problem. and we are acting like we don't give a shit.

two weeks ago tomorrow, 20 kids were gunned down in their school classroom and everyone went batshit crazy about guns, evil, and the like.

we've moved on now, though, haven't we?

have we?

my brother in law offered me some fresh perspective on the matter yesterday. he posted a link on facebook that has documented the 72 homicides in birmingham proper since the beginning of 2012. 72 as of december 15th. at least 57 of the 72 were gun deaths. 6 were from auto collisions. 2 were from blunt force trauma. 1 was from a stabbing.

i'll wait a second and let those numbers sink in. remember, we are talking homicides. people killing other people on purpose. not accidents. not drunk driving situations. in birmingham, in 2012, when people wanted to kill other people, at least 80 percent of the time, the killers were using guns.

cue the hypothetical bogeyman.

cue our paranoia.

cue us thinking that we need guns. to protect ourselves. to protect our families. to protect "us" from black people "them".

ever since i heard the story about the suicide clean-up ministry, there's a part of me that has wanted to find them and be a part of them. what if we all participated in one such job. if not after a suicide, maybe after a homicide. to go in, clean up the death. taste it. feel it. and then have to clean the american horror story out from underneath our fingernails.

jesus christ, people. like, literally, most of us choose to believe the words that came out of his mouth included...

"thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."

and so, what does that mean? does it mean running out to pee-wee's pawn to grab all the ar's we can before the "gubmint" comes to take our guns? does it mean keeping our foot on the necks of the needy and bullshit ourselves into believing they did this to themselves? does it mean that we are totally cool with letting disease rot inside the uninsured and kill them off because by the time they went to the er it was too late? is it merely turning the channel away from the local news when they lead with another shooting in low income housing?

folks, i don't think that's what it means, man. and if the america you believe in believes in these types of things, i'm even less of a patriot than i thought i was.

truthfully, though, i don't think this is what you believe in. not in your heart.

you're just paranoid. or scared. and i get it. i am, too.

we don't have to be this way. america shouldn't feel this way. so, stop it.

the world is full of shit. and guns won't save us.

only hearts full of grace, hearts like those that serve on those suicide clean up squads will lead to any real change. so, maybe we pay a little more in tax. maybe we can't buy weapons of war or mega clips. maybe someone without a job gets considered with the same amount of healthcare as you do. is that really so bad?

and if your answer to any of those is "yes", what does that say about you?

what does it say about us?