(Source: callmekitto, via vivalacheapthrills)
Sara Liz
mermaids, and The Sandlot. ☮
"Baby, be a simple kind of man, be something you love and understand."
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my soul, alight.
“
I am a mother of three girls, ages 2, 6, and 8. Two of them are Sandy Hook School students – one in first grade, one in third grade. I would like to share with you our experience with Dec 14th and my feelings on gun control.
My third grader has gone thru some deep grief over the loss of her siblings’ friends. She was devastated by the loss of the teachers, especially her principal, Dawn Hocksprung, whom we all loved. She is angry that this has happened, that lives were lost so tragically and that she can no longer go to her school. When she was evacuated that day to the fire house, she did not know if her little sister had survived. She struggles with the concept that there is evil in the world, that something this horrific could happen to this town, to her, to her sisters, to her friends. She is 8.
In addition to the tragic loss of her playmates, friends, and teachers, my first grader suffers from PTSD. She was in the first room by the entrance to the school. Her teacher was able to gather the children into the tiny bathroom inside the classroom. There she stood, with 14 of her classmates and her teacher, all of them crying. You see, she heard what was happening on the other side of the wall. She heard everything. Shooting. Screaming. Pleading. She was sure she was going to die that day and did not want to die for Christmas. Imagine what this must have been like.
With PTSD comes fear – all kinds of fear. Each time she hears a loud or unfamiliar noise, she experiences the fear she had in that bathroom. She is not alone. All of her classmates have PTSD. She struggles nightly with nightmares, difficulty falling asleep, and being afraid to go anywhere in her own home. At school she becomes withdrawn, crying daily, covering her ears when it gets too loud and waiting for this to happen again. She is 6.
Imagine being this age and living like this. My children face their fears every day by getting on the bus and going to school. Would you be able to do the same? How would you feel if these were your children?
Although we are getting help and trying to heal, this will affect us for the rest of our lives. We are thankful that by the grace of god, our children came home to us on Dec. 14. As a family and a community, we are deeply saddened and heartbroken at the loss of so many innocent children and beloved teachers.
We are also furious.
Furious that 26 families must suffer with grief so deep and so wide that it is unimaginable.
Furious that the innocence and safety of my children’s lives has been taken.
Furious that someone had access to the type of weapon used in this massacre.
Furious that this type of weapon is even legal.
Furious that gun makers make ammunition with such high rounds and our government does nothing to stop them.
Furious that the ban on assault weapons was carelessly left to expire.
Furious that lawmakers let the gun lobbyists have so much control.
Furious that somehow, someone’s right to own a gun is more important than my children’s rights to life.
Furious that common sense has gone out the window.
Furious that lawmakers are too scared to take a stand.
The “what if’s” never stop going through my mind. What if this weapon were still banned? What if there weren’t high capacity rounds? What if the shooter had different bullets? I think the carnage would have been a lot less. Yes, there would have been losses. But there would have been time. Time to react and possibly make a difference.
Those children and teachers had NO CHANCE. They did not just get shot. They got blown apart.
It’s time to stop catering to the gun owners and lobbyists and start caring about our children, our families, our teachers, our friends and our neighbors. The NRA does not care about people, they care about money.
I don’t believe that anyone, other than the military, has a right to own the type of weapon or ammo used at Sandy Hook.
The second amendment is not limitless.
Weapons like the AR15 have no place in society. This is simply common sense.
Veronique Pozner, mother of Noah Pozner, killed at Sandy Hook Elementary, gave this statement which I believe whole-heartedly:
“The equation is terrifyingly simple: Faster weapons equal more fatalities. This is not about the right to bear arms. It is about the right to bear weapons with the capacity for mass destruction.”
We are trying to move forward, but there must be change. If our lawmakers cannot make this change, then we, as a people will elect those who will.
”—
I dare the Republican members of Congress to take a meeting with her, or any other parent of the victim of gun violence.
(via inothernews)
(via vivalacheapthrills)
there’s no logical reason for shorts to be the same price as pants
(via jennaanne01)
“On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.
So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.
The average person will spend two weeks in his life
waiting for the traffic light to change.
Pubescent girls wait two to four years
for the tender lumps under their nipples to grow.
So the average adult has over 1,460 dreams a year,
laughs 15 times a day. Children, 385 more times.
So the average male adult mates 2,580 times with five different people
but falls in love only twice in his life—possibly
with the same person. Seventy-nine long years for each of us,
awakened to love in our twenties, so more or less
thirty years to love our two lovers each. And if, in a lifetime,
one walks a total of 13,640 miles by increments,
Where are you headed, traveler?
is a valid philosophical question to pose to a man, I think, along with
Why does the blood in your veins travel endlessly?
on account of those red cells flowing night and day
through the traffic of the blood vessels, which if laid out
in a straight line would be over 90,000 miles long.
The great Nile River in Egypt is 4,180 miles long.
The great circle of the earth’s equator is 24,903 miles.
Dividing this green earth among all of us
gives a hundred square feet of living space to each,
but our brains take only one square foot of it,
along with the 29 bones of the skull, so
if you look outside your window with your mind only,
why do you hear the housefly hum middle octave, key of F?
If you listen to the cat on the rug by the fire with
the 32 muscles in your ear, you will hear
100 different vocal sounds. Listen to the dog
wishing for your love: 10 different sounds.
If you think loneliness is beyond calculation,
think of the mole digging a tunnel underground
ninety-eight miles long to China
in one single night. If you think beauty escapes you
or your entire genealogical tree, consider the slug
with its four uneven noses, or the chameleon shifting colors
under an arbitrary light. Think of the deepest point
in the deepest ocean, the Marianas Trench in the Pacific,
do you think anyone’s sadness can be deeper? In 1681,
the last dodo bird died. In the 16th century,
Queen Elizabeth suffered from a fear of roses.
Anne Boleyn had six fingers. People fall in love
twice. The human heart beats 3 billion times — only — in a lifetime.
If you attempt to count all the stars in the galaxy, one
every second, it’ll take 3 thousand years, if you’re lucky.
As owls are the only birds that can see the color blue
the ocean is bluish, along with the sky and the eyes
of that boy who died alone by that little unnamed river
in your dreams one blue night of the war
of one of your lives. (Do you remember which one?)
Duration of World War 1: four years, 3 months, 14 days.
Duration of an equatorial sunset: 128 seconds, 142 tops.
A neuron’s impulse takes 1/1000 of a second,
a morning’s commute from Prospect Expressway
to the Brooklyn Bridge, about 90 minutes,
forty-five without traffic.
Time it takes for a flower to wilt after it’s cut from the stem: five days.
Time left our sun before it runs out of light: five billion years.
Hence the number of happy citizens under the red glow
of that sun: maybe 50% of us, 50% on good days, tops.
Number who are sad: maybe 70% on the good days—
especially on the good days. (The first emotion’s more intense, I think,
when caught up with the second.) So children grow faster in the summer,
their bright blue bodies expanding. The ocean, after all, is blue
which is why the sky now outside your window is bluish
expanding with the white of something beautiful, like clouds.
Fact: The world is a beautiful place—once in a while.
Another fact: We fall in love twice. Maybe more, if we’re lucky.
— Arkaye Kierulf, “Textbook Statistics” (via fleck)
(Source: pigmenting, via alohomoracourage)
