travelingcolors:

Crystal Mill | Colorado (by Brandon Ku)

This day didn’t go quite as planned. I was going to spend the day at uni; instead I found myself at 3 o’clock enjoying brunch (!) and coffee on Smith St. The sun was shining, and as I idly wandered from one opshop to another I glanced at my phone. There were a couple of notifications from facebook, and I scrolled down the newsfeed to find this on Kira‘s wall:

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.” – Washington Irving

“The world is full of Suffering. It is also full of overcoming.” – Helen Keller

Now let us use our tears to come together. We must comfort and support the victims of this unspeakable tragedy and use our power as a community, a nation, to stop senseless death and violence. We must overcome the terror and fear. We can make our world safe, but we must work together to do so.

Despite the warmth of the sun, I shivered. It reminded me of the massacre in Norway, almost exactly a year ago. I wondered what had happened, and turned to twitter to find out. There, Rose had tweeted the above photo, and other tweets and links eventually lead me to a news article that told me that a man in a weird costume had shot several people at a theatre in Colorado.

…

I didn’t know what to say. I still don’t know what to say. My heart hurts for the victims and their families, and for humanity in general.

…

I am also dreading the discussion about gun laws that is bound to ensue.

Tauriq Moosa (whose blog at Big Think is worth following) retweeted this, for example.

Obviously my views are more aligned with Batman, above. Regardless of where you stand on gun control (I mean, even in Norway, where the police don’t even carry guns, a massacre did happen, so these things aren’t just about how easy it is to get access to weapons), the response to violence cannot be more violence. I don’t know how to create a safe world, but I know that it can’t start with a culture of fear.

a friend of mine’s blog. the image is perfect. beautiful quotes too

(Source: wordsonwar.wordpress.com)