Six years. A moment. A lifetime.

It’s been six years since the Sandy Hook shooting, 20 little kids murdered by an angry white man, and it feels like just a minute ago, and it feels like a lifetime ago.

All the shootings since then, schools and other places, all the angry white men collapse in my mind and I want to run to where my son is and hold him tight and somehow make my body protect him from the violence.

At the same time I feel like I’ve gone through a lifetime of sorrow and loss of illusions that we cannot, as a nation, do anything about this.

We fetishize the Second Amendment, though we have legislative and judiciary branches of government whose job it is to update and interpret the law.

The claim that we already have laws and they don’t keep guns out the hands of criminals is disingenuous. With no nationwide concensus on gun laws, we have ended up with a patchwork of weak laws and loopholes that lets anyone with gas money drive to a neighboring state and buy as much firepower as they want.

We regulate cars and Sudafed, lettuce and Adderal. We regulate free speech and voting. We have, since the original composition of the Constitution, abolished slavery, prohibited alcohol and allowed it again, extended the vote to former slaves and to women.

Yet as a nation, we deem it impossible to create national limits on the sale of automatic weapons, or create national standards for background checks.

And so people keep dying. Children keep dying. People of color, women, gays. Straight white men get killed, too, some of them police officers. People keep dying, and we keep avoiding naming the killers: men, white men almost to the one, a slim majority of them involved in domestic violence.

As a nation, it seems we can’t imagine limiting the rights of these white men to their guns, and so every week we go through spasms of grief about another killing, and then we go right on with our lives. I’ve gone numb. How about you?

Be the Revolution. For My Mom

Last weekend, I went to the NYPL to a rally with Writers Resist and PEN America. PEN president Andrew Solomon commented that it has been, in the past, PEN's mission to protest restrictions on freedom of speech in other countries, that it's shocking that they're now working on that issue in the US. "We must pledge to remain shocked," he said.

Robert Pinsky read a poem written for the occasion, beginning "We choose our ancestors," and quoting from writers who fought for freedom. Michael Cunningham read from Ursula K. LeGuin's novel, The Dispossessed: "You can not buy the Revolution. You can not make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution."

We now have a new president. I'll be back on the streets tomorrow, marching from the UN to Trump Tower via 42nd Street and Grand Central, where people can go in and warm up. (Want to join in? Sign up here, information here.) I will march to protest the new regime's position on gay rights, women's rights, health care, climate change, voting rights, police violence, refugees ... pretty much the entire platform.

Last week, The Mate was worried about me going off to protest. This despite the fact that I marched often in the 80s, taking the bus from Philadelphia and, later, New York to Washington DC with the National Organization for Women. He joined me often enough.

Frankly, I was worried too. I now need twice-daily medication, I'm a parent, I'm just older and a little more fragile that I was 30 years ago.

Mate said, "This is your mother's fault."

And he's right, it is her fault. She was born in East Prussia in 1939, fled west with her pregnant mother and two younger siblings in late 1944, lived for a while in a refugee camp. Her father fought for the Germans in WWII. Some day I'll go into the archives and find out what he really did -- the stories vary. He died, according to one of the stories, from a sniper bullet on an otherwise quiet day in 1945.

She couldn't choose her ancestors. I can't choose mine. She gives time and money to libraries and schools, in her community in New Hampshire as well as in other countries. She's active in politics and conservation causes. And she raised me to speak up and speak out against injustice, anywhere, all the time.

She'll be marching tomorrow in New Hampshire, all 78 years and 115 pounds of her, feisty and unstoppable. I will march tomorrow in NYC. This one's for you, mom.

An Open Letter

I've seen several compelling pieces of writing today addressed to white people, asking us to figure out how to stop the shootings. People of color shot by police. Hands in the air. Evidence planted, testimony perjured. Boys shot in the back while fleeing.

I don't know what to do. So I wrote a letter.

Dear Secretary Clinton,

I'm writing to ask you to take a strong and vocal stance against police shootings of black and disabled men, and to make it an issue you will attempt to address substantively within the first 100 days of your presidency.

I don't know how to change a culture, within police departments as well as within our broader United States, in which white police officers routinely find it appropriate to shoot young men -- boys, even -- of color.

I do know that it has to stop. 

You will, I hope, soon be in a position to lead a national dialogue of reconceiving the role of the police in communities, retraining individuals and groups, and beginning to heal some of the rifts between black and white individuals and communities in our country.

Please make this a central part of your commitment to the people of the United States, if elected.

Thank you.

Tomorrow, I'll send versions of this letter to my local and national representatives. 

Please, if you're reading this, take a moment to write a letter as well. Write to your local chief of police, write to your state lawmakers, write to whoever you think is in a position to make a difference.