How can I help?

The news has been blood-soaked this week with killings of black men by police officers and killings of police officers by the mentally unstable seeking retaliation.  It was just shy of a month ago that a home-grown terrorist gunned down over 100 people, killing 49.

Mourn quickly -- death and terror do not stop often enough to let us process the horror of our world.

So much blood. So much grief. So much pain. So much fear. The cares of the world are so much they threaten to overwhelm us all.  I sit stunned, reading, watching, absorbing the news as I hold it in my hands, as it rolls across my computer, and buzzes updates to my phone. I lay awake at night trying to understand and make sense of it all, trying to figure out how to explain this violence to my children, how to explain it to myself.

I've read the commentaries on #blacklivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, #alllivesmatter. The battle lines are clearly drawn, and we stand at the dawn of a day when we don't need foreign terrorists to inspire our fears or spill the blood of our countrymen.  We are managing to destroy American lives just fine.

Yet, the ideas behind all of the movements boil down to one simple, age-old idea: treat others how you want to be treated.  But considering how we have problems with the Golden Rule in church parking lots, supermarket lines and McDonald's drive-thru lanes, and its hard to imagine that we'll see an end to the killing that is destroying men, women and families--leaving us haunted with the images of their children sobbing in ragged grief.

So how can I help?  What do I do to ensure that even one young man is allowed to behave like a normal teenager, and not get shot?  What do I do to ensure that one less father is killed in front of his child? What do I do to protect the new dad who puts on a uniform everyday in an attempt to protect me?

How, in my corner of Idaho, do I make a difference?