It would be refreshing to have a politician try to defend guns without any reference to the Second Amendment, but on the merits of guns.

Was his death an essential stage in the continuation of his life?

Of course food has an important cultural use in families, but there are things that have more important cultural uses in families, and broadening the conversation out simply from what's reasonable also allows in other things.

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

Life is precious, so I ought to spend my days, you know, making sandwiches for homeless people and tending to the elderly in hospice care. Life is precious, so I should give everything away, except that I live in the world. And in the world, I actually have needs and wants, and I value my needs and wants. And I live in the world, and I can't just go make sandwiches every day because I also have to take kids to school. I also have to, you know, write books because that's my livelihood.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Compassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us.