i feel disassociation. I’m not relating to the march, regardless of the fact that we need intelligent gun control.
I look at pics and I’m more taken with the social-technological phenomena that could make organization on this mass scale possible than I am with the cause; with what makes an issue popular; with the algorithms that capture/mold people’s attention toward a single trending issue and then cast them together on streets around the nation, only to address a problem that comprises a heartbreaking but almost negligible fraction of the illness upon this era of human history.
Most know my cause is what we eat, which is intimately related to more pressing, but less popular issues (because they require personal change) like deteriorating health and dwindling sources of water and energy, increases in world hunger, pollution, and potentially widespread and unstoppable fatal viruses emerging from animal agriculture, all of which relate to human physical-mental-spiritual health and disposition, pharmaceuticals, and the mass overmedication of 75% of Americans, related to gun violence, related to the ego-centrist culture that drives everything above.
I saw many kids holding the same sign: “Am I next?” Probably not, as a victim of gun violence, but statistically likely as a victim of a preventable chronic disease which often renders an otherwise capable agent of change into a slave to corrupt systems.
My foremost thought – if every speck of a human in the aerial pictures of Saturday’s crowds was a tiny light, and if every tiny light lit up by radically changing their own conduct as a consumer instead of begging something outside of themselves – a corrupt government – for reform, any kind of reform on any given issue, we’d blaze a radiance so bright it would knock the darkness off the map and transform this nation’s everyday atmosphere from a culture of death to a culture of life so fast the whole planet might tilt off its current axis of evil.
And only then would we actually have a real movement For Our Lives.
“Ughh, maybe we should just kill ourselves,” my friend joked.
For that, we’ll need guns.
Teach kids to embody the change we ask for.
—ruby roth
Flommist Ruby Roth is an artist, designer, creative strategist, and the author-illustrator of four leading books for kids. Her work has been featured on Today, CNN, FOX, NBC, ABC News, and other major media outlets. Copyright © 2018 Ruby Roth.
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