Weekly Wrap-Up

“Perhaps that's what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it? “- Toni Morrison, “Song of Solomon” 1977

This week has brought a lot of loss, some very personal and some that haunts all of us. We again mourn the people who lost their lives to domestic terrorism in the US. Since the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012, there have been at least 2,179 mass shootings in the US, with at least 2,459 killed and 9,122 wounded. Mass shooting deaths, less than 2 percent of all deaths from gun violence, create shockwaves in the sea that is the US gun violence epidemic.

Meanwhile, many of our elected officials in the US hide behind empty thoughts and prayers, blame video games or mental health issues (with no evidence to back those claims), refusing to fund research to understand the causes of this epidemic and blocking efforts to institute reasonable gun laws. We deserve better, for ourselves and for all the people we have lost.

This week, we also lost Toni Morrison. There are few words that can give measure to this loss, so we invoke her words.

"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab bag candy game."

—In the November 2003 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine

WHAT WE’VE DONE

WHAT WE LIKE

READING CORNER

IN OUR EARBUDS

Don’t hesitate to send us your podcast suggestions and summer reads.

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

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