Here is the link to Committee Contacts for the Colorado House Representatives.

Here is the link to find your representatives by Zip-Code.

Here is a link to collective resources like Blood Donation, Crisis Counseling, Faith Communities and plenty more.

Here is a link to several Go-Fund-Me’s for the victims of the Texas shooting.

Now that that is out of the way…. Let’s talk about my favorite subject.

Me.

On 5/30 I was headed to the airport to pick up my roommate. He was flying in from a trip to Washington DC where he was visiting his sister. The night before, I got a message on Discord (an online chat app) from him. This was odd because… well because he has my phone number and has never once messaged me on there.

“BTW I lost my phone saving a man drowning in the Potomac (insert crying minion emoji). I should be getting a new one tomorrow morning but if I don’t, be advised I cannot be reached via telefono.”

Immediately I assumed this was a joke and that he had lost his phone doing some stupid bridge jump into that flowing sewage that masquerades as a river. I drove to the airport – I called him – he answered.

He got in my car (a Tacoma if you were curious – BIG truck guy…) and we started making our way back towards the apartment. I asked the obvious question –

“So….. what happened to your phone?”

He then proceeded to tell me that he did indeed lose it. While saving a man from drowning. In the Potomac. He was kayaking and while floating down the river with his Dad and Sister, noticed a man was trying to swim across. He said it was pretty clear about half way across that this story was not going to end well. 40 feet or so from the shore, the man started to lose control and shout for help.

He paddled over – threw the man a life vest – and then tried to pull him into the boat. The man – being a tad bit overweight and more than a tad bit panicked – was less than graceful in trying to get into the kayak. The kayak flipped.

The phone, which was sitting in my roommates open pocket (because he is a moron), slid out and into the river.

With their life vests – they dragged the Kayak to the shore. They emptied it and soon realized there was a language barrier between them. One of them fluent in English, the other in Spanish.

The man who had been drowning, with a huge grin on his face, screamed “WAS MY RECORD!” and excitedly ran towards his friends who had now appeared on the shore.

Now this scene provokes more than one question in my mind…. But the first is…. His record? This man has tried this before? This man has clearly failed before – as this was his record? How many times has this man – who clearly cannot swim – tried this trek? Why were his friends just watching? Can he even swim? Was Ashton Kutcher about to run out of the trees in a 2022 reboot of the TV show we all miss the most, Punk’d?

These questions will never get an answer but even while writing this I am chuckling. HIS RECORD?!?

My roommate went on to tell me he’s thankful that he makes enough money to simply walk into an Apple store, buy a new phone and move on. We had a short discussion about whether or not Apple Care + is worth the price. He told me his bucket list includes “saving someone’s life” but that he didn’t feel this was quite enough to check that off.

Now…

Since publishing the last blog post – My inbox has been a nightmare. It has consisted of relatives I haven’t spoken to in years reaching out, people whose names I don’t recognize at all; reminding me we met at some concert some time ago, and the occasional bat-shit nuts conspiracy theorist making sure that I knew this was done by Joe Biden and his Goonies (I wish I was joking…)

But by far – the most consistent feedback I have gotten is something like this.

“I agree. That is how I feel. I feel angry, I feel apathetic, I feel helpless. But you didn’t give us anything to do about it. You didn’t provide a link – you didn’t give us a number to call. You just pointed out a problem – but what do you expect us to do about it?”

I have gotten more than a dozen phone calls from people – telling me that they liked my post but that I really didn’t offer any solutions. I didn’t give any action that people could take in order to overcome their apathy …

And that brings us here.

You missed the point.

For the past 23 years since Columbine, that has been our reaction. It has been our reaction to news articles, headlines, twitter posts and blogs. We read the articles and we hope that at the end – the author gives us a way out of the discomfort. We expect to see solutions written out that we can commit to memory – knowing that when this comes up at dinner parties; we might be on the educated side of the debate.

We expect people, smarter and more powerful than us, to come up with answers that we can silently agree with; deceiving ourselves that knowing an answer and acting to bring one to life; are one in the same.

We expect to see a link to a Go-Fund-Me that we can donate to. We expect to see a phone number that we can call or a poll we can sign. We expect to be spoon-fed solutions that will dull the edge just enough for us to slip back into being comfortable.

We expect sedation.

I want to be clear – I believe you want to help. I believe you are as angry about this as I am. But I am begging you to try and see what I am saying. If what you wanted are links to click, or numbers to call; they were at the beginning of this post and it took me exactly 38 seconds to find those resources on google and copy them into hyperlinks. (yes. I timed it.)

I have never called a congressman in my life. And I am willing to wager that the vast majority of my readers haven’t either. And this isn’t because we don’t have the phone numbers or because we don’t have enough people reminding us about it on our Instagram feeds; it’s because we know, at our core, that calling our congressman is useless. We believe that adding our names to a never-ending list, hoping to actually get one of them on the phone, is a waste of our time.

We never make that call because the only thing greater than our anger is our apathy.

I have donated to things I care about – but an uglier reality is that I have opted out of donating to charities and fundraisers when it starts to take more than 3 or 4 clicks or when the site is hard to navigate.

It takes me less than 38 seconds – the amount of time it took to piece together those links – for my energy to settle back down into apathy. How long does it take you?

I’ll say it again. You missed my point.

We are the most well-funded, well-resourced and well connected generation to ever walk this Earth. We have more free time, more access to information and our voices carry further than ever before.

If you got to the end of my last post and were upset that I didn’t give you any solution; it’s because, at present, I don’t have one. It’s because I have spent the last 8 years waiting for someone to put something that feels significant and actionable in front of me – and it has yet to happen. It’s because for the last 8 years I have waited for someone, anyone, to pitch a solution that might actually work.

I don’t know the answer – but shrugging that reality off on the assumption that someone else will find one, draft one and pass one – has to come to an end.

This is on us.

This is on you.

This is on me.

If your reaction to my first post was to ask me “so what do we do about it” – then I hope you are starting to see the problem. The asking of that question is our problem. The endless waiting for someone else to do something about it is our problem. The expectation that we would be spoon-fed a solution is our problem.

This is our world.

This is our country.

This is our generation.

and for many of you – these are your kids.

Every now and then – life offers us an opportunity to prove to ourselves that we actually are who we believe we are.

We all surround ourselves with a narrative of who we would like to be; the type that would rush the gunman; the type that would pull a man from a burning car; the type that would gladly give up a phone in order to save a drowning man in the Potomac.

I hear people talk about this; about how they would handle a shooting or a crisis or some natural disaster. Some are humble, others less so. They talk about it trying to maintain some image of who they think they are; assuming that person would still be there when shots go off.

Sometimes when those moments come – we get to laugh on our way back from the airport, confident that we lived up to the challenge. Confident that we are decent humans, we feel at rest.

This is not one of those moments; for we have done none of these things; and we ourselves were not in this shooting.

The more important question; and a much more clear diagnosis of ourselves; is what have we done with the situation we are actually in.

If you were on the shore – and the person most responsible for handling this, the man in the kayak passing by, was clearly ignoring it. Would you still stand by? Or would you get in the water. Would you sit idly by, bitter at the man in the kayak for not doing enough? Waiting for a better man in a different kayak to come after him? Or would you silently whisper “fuck him” while you waded yourself towards the people who were suffering?

How many headlines do we need to read before we take seriously the responsibility on our shoulders to be the ones who are creating these solutions – rather than just the ones clicking links. 

Tell me with sincerity that you have done anything to push back against all the things that make you angry.

“How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing” – Annie Dillard, The Writing Life