SMC

This morning I was stopped in my car on the corner of Pico/20th, hours before the Santa Monica College shootings. For whatever reason, my attention was struck by a Powerball lottery sign outside of the liquor store, "believe in something bigger" it said. Grumpily or smug, I laughed to myself at the seemingly shameless merging of two perceived opiates, the debasing of spirituality for dumb hope, dumb belief in dumb luck. I was even about to take a picture with my cell phone when the light turned green and I drove onward. Now, I can't help but suspect that I noticed this sign for a different reason, not spiritual, nor a clue to go try my numbers. The something bigger, I believe is a human decency and logic, where in a modern society striving for peacefulness, there is a stark indecency in the availability of purposeless weaponry, specifically guns, designed, not for hunting or sport, but reckless violence and inevitable tragedy. The something bigger is knowing that we're capable of higher thoughts, feelings, actions than are capable with streets and homes stockpiled with brightly inane mechanisms of inhumanity without cause and hideous in effect. It's time as an advanced people to recognize that changes must be made in our laws, not to strip us of our liberties but to allow the return and acceleration of a flourishing of freedoms, to be able to sit in our cars and uninhibitedly wonder at the bigger things.