Lately, I've been very outspoken on this issue, on Facebook, getting people to respond to an atrocity. I have always owned cats. Commanche, Siren, Kumo, Mocha, Natsha, Chloe, Lilly. Those cats have been with me throughout my entire life. Kumo is still here. Commanche died from probably cancer, something no vet will ever know. Siren, on the other hand, and she had been mentioned in blog posts before, I didn't know how to deal with. I left her in an abandoned lot in Brooklyn, simply because I didn't know how to care for her. I knew where she had been left was a rescue center for cats, that she would be found and taken care of. I'll never forget "dropping her off" there. She followed me home and I shooed her away. She was sick in a cat way that vets, without the money I had already put into her ($2500) could not diagnose.
And so, this cat, who slept with me every night for ten years became too much to handle (or, sadly, too expensive). And, I let her go into the wild. I'll never stop feeling guilt for that.
So, there are kids, who are not cats, who got shot in a small Connecticut town. And, I feel like there are so many citizens of this country who just see them as "pets." They are things we have very little obligation towards because we want what we want. That "want" turns into a very personal validation of an outdated need. We don't need guns anymore in the way the Constitution printed it.
I had put on my Facebook post that this country really doesn't care about its' citizens anymore. That basic heath care was a fight. That we had to get all uppity to just have one basic right announced and put into law for all of us. That was a battle. And, we, seemingly, the country won that one. Yet, when it comes to this senseless violence, this death without meaning, we are silent for the most part. There will be another one of these. We will sit there and say, what could we have done differently?
Back to Siren. If I had the resources (which were not there), I would have gotten her help. I'd have taken her to as many clinics as she could have been taken to (which had not existed), and I would have done all I could have done.
A cat and the gun are the same in so many ways.
