Dear Orlando,
I would be amiss not to reach out to you, on one of your darkest days. I would be amiss to go about my day without putting down these thoughts gnawing at my heart. Because I always knew you to be kind and curious and warm, a city that welcomes people from all over the world every day. You did not deserve this. Nobody deserves this.
We see your tears and we weep with you. One thing I learned from these past few days is that we all grieve, we all reel and cry out in a common language. We all feel our blood go cold when we hear the gun shots played over again on the news, shots that echo so much farther than a dark night club on a Saturday night. And the world is grieving with you. We feel your pain, our hearts break for you and for those beautiful, precious souls that you lost, that we all lost. Today we are all Floridians, we are all Americans, we are all members of the LGBT community. We will stand with you against this act of terror.
I can't even wrap my mind around what could possibly take a person to such a dark and deeply inhuman place, that he could utterly obliterate so much innocence. In the course of a few hours, he single handedly wrote one of the darkest chapters in your history, in our history. He used the language of violence, of destruction of terror. Pages soaked in blood, pages soaked in hate.
It's a story that moves us to agony, to try to understand an incomprehensible world where so much hatred could exist in one person.
But his part of the story is over. And he doesn't get to write the ending, we do.
To all the brave law enforcement and medical professionals who answered the call, who treated and served the victims, who were heroes that night, you are writing the ending.
To all those of you who stood in line for hours at the blood banks the day after the attack and
those of you who continue to give of yourselves in these coming days and weeks, you are writing the
ending.
To all those of your who are sharing your stories and your memories of those that were lost, you are writing the ending.
To the mental health professionals that worked to make services available to victims and families the day of the attack and those of you who will be serving victims and families in the months to come, you are writing the ending.
Because in this world, we can choose hate or we can choose Love. When we reach out to our neighbors with open arms and say, yesterday we were different, but today we are the same, we choose Love. When we are a little kinder than we need to be, we choose Love. When we write a letter to our Congressman to affect change, we choose Love. When we try to learn about someone who is different than us, we choose Love. When we seek first to understand, rather than to be understood, we choose Love. When we forgive our neighbors and learn to forgive ourselves, we choose Love.
Perhaps it's naive, but I have to believe, at the end of all of
this, that Love is stronger than we think. That Love is down but not out and that it will rise again twice as strong. I have to believe that Love may lose a battle, but not the war. That
although we cannot re-write the past, we can shape the future.
I have to
believe that in the end, Love wins.
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Information on how you can help (even from far away) can be found here.
My friend and hero Bridget, a fellow Washingtonian-Orlandonian, wrote a super thoughtful and thought-provoking blog post, which you can read here.
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