Dancing for Peace

I am not going to do this anymore. I will not gather the brokenhearted in a park to weep and light candles. I will not wipe my tears with my grandmother’s handkerchief, trying to find solace from family long-departed.

No. Instead, I’m going dancing. I will weep as I dance, tears that dancing will turn to Joy and movement.

On the 20th of November, Club Q was the site of the 600th public massacre this year. Yes. Massacre is the word I’m using for this heinous violence. Everything else seems so polite. It talks about the action, but not the intent. In this case: to kill LGBTQIA folk. But it could easily have been People of Color, Jews or Muslims, People of Poverty, or People with Disabilities. This time he saved his hatred for Queers and Gender Transgressors, bless and honor their dancing hearts.

The shooter, another violence-debilitated, 20-something white male (and I say white male because most of these shooters are white men), left his home in his Second-Amendment Sanctuary city, walked into a dance club with an AR15 rifle and a handgun. He killed five people and wounded eighteen. Glory be to a straight white dad, there for the drag show, who stopped him with a little help from two dancers, one, a well shod drag queen who kicked when told to by the dad.

The violence has to stop. The perpetrators are not the people who will stop it. The Second Amendment Sanctuary City who doesn’t report acts of violence did not tag him for having threatened to kill his mother with a bomb (a real rather than imagined bomb), so he was not being watched. 

The hero of the moment, a weapons-trained former major in the military, picked up the handgun beside him, and hit the shooter over the head with it, to stop him. He could have shot him. He didn’t. He made a choice and handled it. 

What do we do? First, we have to accept that all of us are part of all of this. I’m not saying you think that way, but some of us do. They may think however they wish. They cannot be allowed to use violence against those they do not “approve of.” Second, laws must be changed and enforced and we can do that.

We cannot continue to passively cry about this.  I will dance. Sometime in December, the Campus Theatre is having an 80s dance party. (Follow their FB page.) Let’s go dancing. I will put on my clergy best and dance on the edges of the circle with my fellow clergy and any cis-het couples who come to dance with us there. Let us then invite all our relations and neighbors in all their beauty into the center of the circle so that we can keep them safe and so that the faces they see are joyful and full of Love. 

What if the first movements in the womb are fluttering dances of life… why would we choose to forget how to dance? Let us dance, all of us together, and let us allow ourselves to flood with Joy. Let us leave dancing and get busy in this season of thanksgiving and wonder making this a world of thanksgiving and wonder for everyone. Because we are called to be Peacemakers and we are called to dance for Peace.

Three days later, that tragic number became 601, with six more victims and four wounded. The suspect killed himself. We will dance for them as well.

Salaam, Shalom, Peace. Blessed be.

Ann Keeler Evans, The Priestess and Peacemaker is in! Find me at https://annkeelerevans.organd sign up for my daily musing.