this isn’t about politics, its about love!

 Maybe you’re gonna hate me, or dislike what I say… Better yet call me a liberal (I’m pretty sure I’ve been called worse), but a girl can only take so much, and, after all, I’m 45, so my wrinkling skin is thicker.

I DON’T LIKE GUNS 

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have yours, but the ways things are now, …well it’s not really working for our country as a whole. I listened to Anderson Cooper interview President Obama last night, and honestly, I thought that the discussion rambled on a bit.  It wasn’t clear, it wasn’t concise. Nobody seemed to buy into the “I’m not trying to take your gun” .. Except me, because deep down… A bit of me wants him too, and I don’t see him doing it. But I respect your freedom and mine way too much to really want that. One thing he said rang so true to me that I can’t get it out of my head… “Maybe of the 30,000 deaths – we get it down to 28,000.. And that’s 2000 families that don’t suffer a loss”….Wow. Thats not a big percentage to gauge success, yet I agree. And it’s really not his words that stick in my mind….His words I can wash from my mind as fast as footprints wash from the Florida beach during a summer thunderstorm.. But it’s the faces..they are all in my mind.  And worse yet, I can picture or imagine the faces of even the ones I don’t know, never will know… The families of the school kids… Good grief…It doesn’t matter…

There was one night during my pediatric surgical residency.. It was well after dark. Time was not real to me then.. Every other night call.. Pre “80 hour work hour regulation”. I was wiped out. I had a son at the time.. Maybe 2 years old. I had spent the last several hours in the operating room trying to save a young girl… I failed. She was coding when she came into the trauma bay and I never got her back more than 5 mins at a time… And then finally, never. Hours had past since I brought the parents into the blood drenched operating room to say goodbye… In fact, as I recall I had done another minor surgery after that. I walk out of the lounge, after my dinner of Cheerios, coffee and milk and there are the parents… Sitting there in the waiting room. Just sitting.  They are not crying, talking, reading. They are both sitting, staring straight ahead. A 30 or so year old white middle class couple sitting like they are waiting to be called, in the now-empty hospital, in the late night. I’m perplexed. So I go to them and ask if they need help, a ride, me to call someone. And the mom looks up at me and states simply ” we can’t leave. How can we go without her?” 

Damn it! The tears I have cried, the tears I cry. The tears they cry and cried and maybe… Now even you cry, they mean nothing if another child dies a preventable death… If another child dies from an all terrain vehicle accident, if another child drowns in an unsecured pool, if another child is shot or shoots him or herself. 

So Obama, I don’t take sides in politics often… I’m opinionated and I never agree with anyone on everything, but with this, I stand with you. I stand with the idea that every single solitary death that is preventable and prevented is a step toward a better United States. Maybe gun control won’t stop mass shooting events, but it may make them less lethal and may make easy access less easy for kids thus reducing accidental gun deaths and suicides. Mr Obama isn’t changing much.. In fact, to me, it’s not enough. But I’m in. You? If you don’t agree, it’s ok. I will still leave the hospital and cry for your family whether you are rich or poor, republican or democrat, support gun control, have a pool fence, put your kids in car seats, or not. For me, it’s not just political. It’s personal.