We get it, bad guys.  You’re out there.  You’re mad/sad/hurt/sick/hateful/broken.  You bomb/shoot/explode/destroy/maim/kill.  We get it already.

But there’s one thing you never do.

You don’t win.

Love wins.  Goodness wins.  Every time.  Period.

Because no matter what, we raise our kids and make art and care for each other and bake cookies and sing and dance.  You destroy.  We create.  No one gets remembered for demolition.  We remember architects, inventors, musicians, writers, artists, doctors, scientists.

Creation is work.  Destruction is easy and mindless and uninspired.  It takes seconds and no skill to gun down a classroom of children, seconds and second-grade reading skills to look up bomb-building instructions on the internet, seconds and opposable thumbs to gang-rape a child and post photos of your utter loser-ness.  I will spend the next couple of decades and everything that is in me raising the two boys whose lives each took me nine months to create, writing the stories I need to tell.

At first, I hear the news of shootings, bombings, assaults, and I’m shocked and saddened.  Next, I’m enraged.  And then, finally, I settle into sorrow.  For you.  For the unspeakable waste of all the creation that went into you, and for the breath-stealing awfulness of whatever turned you from the human impulse for goodness to the soul-devouring need for destruction.

I feel sorry for you, because you cannot win.  Because you are playing the wrong game by the wrong rules.  You missed the plot.  And something drove you to that point.  I wish I knew what it was.  I wish I could fix it.  But it’s beyond me.  All I can do is write my novels, raise my boys, love my husband, cherish my friends, feed every single hungry creature that shows up on my doorstep, bake chocolate chip cookies, sing loudly in the shower.  Create, create, create. 

Creation is the origin of everything, and the best answer to destruction–the beginning and the end.

And until you realize this, you cannot win.

If and when you do realize it, we’ll be waiting to welcome you home.

I’ll bring the cookies.