Monday morning I woke up. The first day of homecoming week. I had my favorite pumpkin shirt and Christmas pants ready for mismatch day. I walked out to my car and felt the cool fall breeze. I breathed in the fresh air. It felt like such a good day.

I hopped into my car and turned on my favorite radio show.

Boom.

There it was, more bad news. No, not just bad news, really really bad news. The largest mass shooting in modern American history. Fifty-nine people are dead.

Wow, I was just SO focused on my pumpkin shirt and having a good day. I was thinking about the fun week and the dress I would wear for the dance on Saturday. Meanwhile, people across the country are simultaneously miserable with the pain of losing friends and family members.

So that was enough to make me feel really guilty. I think what happened on Sunday night caused a lot of people to feel like me – guilty. When something like this happens and the world just keeps on going and we just keep on moving, it just feels kind of wrong. It feels like we shouldn’t be able to worry about the tiny things anymore. And it feels like we would be better off stopping everything because it just seems insensitive to keep going.

I guess that’s the issue then, isn’t it? The question of whether or not it is a bad thing that our world has become so fast paced that now we can’t seem to stop for one another anymore? I guess I don’t think so. Not because I’m insensitive and heartless, but because I just don’t think that is very effective. I’ve been there a thousand times. The place where you just sit wonder how our world could be so cruel. I’ve sat in sorrow and pity but still nothing gets better. So I don’t think that moving on is always a bad thing. In this case, it feels uncomfortable and a little bit wrong, but I don’t think it is. I think that we should keep moving because horrible and infuriating things happen in this life, but that doesn’t mean that life is bad.

So we HAVE to keep moving. We can stop and say a prayer and feel angry for a minute, but then we have to keep going because the man that shot up a stadium already took 50 lives, and we CAN’T let him control ours too. We can’t let him convince us that the world is bad, and that there is not hope. We can’t let him take our routine and our lives and the tiny little things that we care about. We have to remember that it is ok to care about those things, because those things are our life. They are what make our life good and they are what keep our big complicated world functioning.

We’ll never figure out why he did it. Why this happened. What this means. We will NEVER know, so we can’t keep sitting around thinking about it. We have to keep going, and take our power back. That is what we can do for this nation right now. We can refuse to let the evil people and the evil things take more from this country than they already have, and we can keep moving.