My daughter told me existence was too big for her.

She is ten years old and is overwhelmed by the inevitability of death, the seeming futility of life, the impossible demand to achieve something so that she can outlast death. Again, she is ten. I was the same at ten — or I would have been, if I hadn’t had the security blanket of heaven.

That’s a security blanket we never let her have, because it can keep you warm, but it can strangle you too. It doesn’t just cover your body; it covers your eyes. And we wanted our little girl to have her eyes open. But with your eyes open, sometimes you see scary things, like the vastness of the universe.

When I became an atheist I struggled with these same ideas. Every now and then I still do. I think about how I’m going to die and turn to dust, and my kids are going to die and turn to dust. The world—the only place of existence I have ever known, the sum total of my experience—will die and turn to dust. It is a suffocating thought. It can kill you if you let it.

Like I so often do, I wrote a book about it to get my thoughts out. Running from it wasn’t working, so I plunged into the reality and inevitability of death, and I managed to find some meaning, if not resolution.

The other morning, when my daughter was gasping for breath as those same relentless waves buffeted her, I knew I owed her something. I had taken her blanket. I owed her something. Whatever I could find.

So I shared with her the same idea that eventually helped me get my feet. It goes like this:

Imagine a vast desert. A place of death so large it has no endings and no barriers. In it you cannot breathe. You cannot survive. There is no food or water or love. It is endless devastation.

And then, somewhere in that horrible place, imagine a little oasis. Water and cool air. Oxygen and family and hugs. A walled place, a place of safety.

Through sheer luck or cosmic providence, we are in the oasis. Right now. And dwelling on death and inevitability is choosing to leave the walls of the oasis and go into the desert, where all we can do is die. We have the power to stay in the oasis. All we have to do is exercise it.

How long will it last? What’s the point if the end is inevitable? Even asking these questions is leaving the oasis. The universe is full of unanswerable questions, and worse, answers we don’t want to hear. We can’t change those answers. But dwelling on them is ignoring the single most beautiful, precious gift the universe gave us: the existence we have at this moment.

I don’t know if it helped her. Later that day she said she had developed her own analogy—not just like mine, but maybe inspired by mine—and now she felt better.

That was enough for me.

The Facebook post is about the slaughtered children in Texas today, and a Democratic Senate candidate going on the air to demand action. Most of the responses are Likes. At least one is a laughing face.

A laughing face.

To the user who posted it, I have to say, your response makes me wonder. How broken, how monstrous, must you be to laugh right now? If it had been your child slaughtered today, would you still find this Democrat’s outrage funny?

It is a particularly brutal response to post publicly, because Facebook, presumably, added that laughing reaction as a way for people to share joy. Laughter is one of the most fundamental of shared human experiences. It can break the tension of a hard situation. It can bring enemies together. It can dispel tears and conquer grief.

To twist it this way, to turn it into a thing of scorn in a time of such deep sorrow, is a repulsive abdication of empathy.

I wonder if you could take a step back and truly examine what it is, exactly, that you find so humorous about this situation. If you could take a look in the mirror and say to yourself: “I am a person who laughs when children are slaughtered.” Is that really something you’re comfortable with? Does there come a point when you realize that perhaps your philosophy has led you astray? That it’s transformed you so thoroughly that empathy and compassion appear to be powers you’ve lost?

Or is the philosophy so ingrained, the indoctrination so complete, that no amount of bloodshed will wipe the smirk from your face?

A friend of mine announced today that he has pancreatic cancer and is in hospice.

And in that bombshell of a sentence, the word I debated using the most was “friend.”

See, I’ve never met this person. I have only ever communicated with him through Facebook. I was introduced to him by a former boss, a person I had a lot of respect for, and even though she was conservative in her views, she saw that we were both secular liberals, and put us in touch. Over the years I’ve been lucky enough to know him, he has made me laugh and made me feel less alone. I have come to recognize his name with joy, and respect his words. So even though I’ve never met him, I don’t hesitate to call him a friend—and I don’t even feel the need to add the qualifier “Facebook” to that word.

His communication that he was dying was honest and dignified. He said he accepted what was happening to him, that he was OK with where his journey had brought him. It was a sharp reminder that we should all be so lucky to make the same claim, and an inspiration to this atheist of what I strive for. Happiness, contentment, love. The true meaning of life, the most important things.

I have had family members die that didn’t make me cry, but I cried today for this man I never met. For the reminder that all of us have a time limit, and that all good things come to an end. For the bitter fact that life isn’t fair. Out of gratitude that I live in an age where it was possible for me to meet him without meeting him.

Social media gets a lot of flak, much of it deserved, but it is a force for good as well. Today, as I think about my dying friend, I’m thankful for it. It allowed me to not only get to know this person, but also to experience his last digital words, his acceptance of his fate. That is something I will treasure until my own time comes, when hopefully it will serve me as well as it served him.

I hear a lot about these Parkland kids that are standing up for themselves in the face of both the horrific gun massacre that slaughtered so many of their classmates, and the Republicans’ continued appalling failure to act to prevent more like it. I hear that they are courageous and visionary, and that they are going to rise up and fix this problem. People say this like it’s a good thing.

Are they courageous? Absolutely. Visionary? Certainly.

But I feel like this calculus ignores that they are also terrified. That they were dragged into this fight, literally, at gunpoint.

I love these kids, but I hate that they have to do what they’re doing. They never should have come to this point, because we—YOU and I—should have solved this problem long before it shot their friends to death.

Claiming that “they will solve this problem” is a copout. It is just another way to wait around and hope someone else fixes it. Do they need our support? Yes, absolutely, of course, but the fact of the matter is that WE SHOULD HAVE ALREADY BEEN DOING ALL OF THIS. They should be getting our backs, not asking us to get theirs.

The fact that we claim a bunch of teenagers in Florida are now responsible for solving this problem is ghastly. They aren’t. They are children. Our continued and abject failure to demand change has resulted in a massacre that has altered the course of their lives forever. That is not a cause for celebration. It is a reason for shame.

After Columbine, we should have demanded change—of our laws, of our legislators, and of ourselves. And certainly after Sandy Hook, we should have refused to accept inaction as a possibility; we should have staged a die-in at every state capitol, barricaded doors, swarmed the news, and demanded better laws that would actually protect our children. We spent far too much time waiting to get angry, and we cannot now allow these kids to pick up our slack. We need to pick up our own slack.

Post. Donate. Protest. Call your rep, call your rep, call your rep.

Don’t leave these kids carrying this god-awful burden alone. We failed them once. We should be carrying them now, not the other way around.

I coached policy debate for about ten years, and in policy debate we had a thing called a “perceptual link.” That was a fancy term for something that happens not because A causes B, but because people THINK A causes B. One of the ideas you learn in policy debate is that when a perceptual link is involved, the TRUTH DOESN’T MATTER. What matters is people’s perception, and ultimately, their attitudes based upon that perception—because those attitudes can directly affect elections, markets, and other attitudes. While it can feel unfair or ephemeral, a perceptual link is no less a driver of events than hard science or mathematical absolutes.

Al Franken, my senator for nearly nine years, resigned today due to a perceptual link.

We are in the middle of an unprecedented wave of consequences for sexual abusers, from Roger Ailes and Bill O’reilly to Louis CK and Garrison Keillor. Wherever these people are employed or answerable to economic partnerships, they are going down in droves—losing their jobs, their shows, and their continued livelihoods like dominoes.

But it’s different in politics. In politics, the voters decide. And so you have Donald Trump and Roy Moore, both accused of pedophilia, one in the White House and one on track to win the race for Senate in Alabama. You have John Conyers, who resigned the day before last, and, of course, you have Al Franken.

I don’t know what actually happened with Al. I don’t know what he’s actually guilty of and what he’s not. But I suspect, based on what he’s admitted in his apologies and what he’s hedged on, that he did some very inappropriate things at his own campaign events – particularly, grabbing some butts that weren’t his to grab, and trying to kiss women who were thoroughly uninterested.

I think it’s important to note that this behavior is not as inappropriate as touching a 14-year-old girl under her clothes, or hosting a sex party with 15-year-olds – crimes that Moore and Trump are accused of, respectively – but it’s still behavior that should be unacceptable from anyone, and particularly from a US senator.

In a perfect world, the relative scale of these crimes would be considered. Trump would have failed in his bid for the presidency because of his disgusting habits, and Moore would have dropped out of the race – both would have faced criminal charges. Franken, arguably guilty of a lesser offense, would have faced an ethics investigation, probable censure, and steep opposition in his next primary.

The problem is that whole question of “a lesser offense.” Roy Moore and Donald Trump are both so incredibly toxic, they both taint the conversation so thoroughly, that it is impossible to be accused of a lesser charge right now without getting swept into their orbit. “Moore, Trump, and Franken” were mentioned as a single unit over and over in the news and on social media. The correct punishment for pedophile politicians, at a minimum, is for them to lose their positions, and people are right to call for this action from Trump and Moore. But being lumped in with them due to the current environment, Franken had to either accept that resignation was the appropriate consequence, or attempt to argue on a national stage that his offenses were of a lesser degree. That would have required going over those offenses in excruciating detail: the age of each of his accusers, the situation in which he molested them, his excuses or reasons for doing so. Publicly litigating those kinds of details in the current environment only makes them worse. Every time Franken would have to say “I touched her butt,” he would be admitting his sexual harassment publicly.

In the meantime, Moore would get elected to the senate and Trump would continue to occupy the white house. Every time Franken opened his mouth to argue the lesser magnitude of his offenses, he would sound just like them. Look at some of the “arguments” he’s already tried to make: “I didn’t mean it that way,” “I meant it affectionately,” etc. Setting aside the questionable validity of these statements, simply making them strips away his ability to effectively legislate for women.

I suspect he decided one of three things: that his career wouldn’t survive such a trial, that it wasn’t worth the agony of trying to parse out the severity of the offense, or that doing so would play directly into the hands of vermin like Trump and Moore, who would point gleefully at him and cry, “See? See?” while skating clean on their own, far worse, offenses. Maybe he decided on all three. I don’t know and probably never will. What I do know is that in this environment, today, public perception prevented any kind of nuanced analysis of his relative sins. He was automatically lumped in with the worst. I’m not saying that was good or bad. It’s simply what I think happened.

There is one more angle to this, which is this idea that the democrats stabbed him in the back in order to maintain the party’s “moral high ground” and as a result we should all hate them. Setting aside for the moment the fact that democrats on both sides of the current divide – establishment/Clinton democrats and “herbal tea party”/Sanders democrats – called for him to step down, again, I don’t believe public perception would have allowed for anything else. A public ethics investigation involving the kind of language I described above, in the current environment, would have absolutely annihilated any argument that the democrats are the party of feminism. When both sides are making the exact same excuses for their sexual abusers, using the exact same language, and pointing the exact same fingers, there is no moral high ground.

“So what?” you might say. “What has the moral high ground ever gotten us?”

The thing is, the moral high ground is not and has never been about “getting us” anything. It’s about doing the right thing, even if it costs you, even if that cost is higher than it would be in a perfectly fair world. It’s about aiming for an ideal in the hopes that one day you will reach it. I keep hearing this argument that the female senators who called for Al’s resignation yesterday were party loyalists, just trying to keep the party’s nose clean. I say if that’s case, thank god for them.

If both parties demand that the other party’s molesters step down before they take down their own, they are no different on this issue. If both scream and point fingers, they are no different. If neither is willing to enforce their ideals by making difficult decisions, then they are the same.

No, the Republicans are not going to rush to follow the example set yesterday by Kirsten Gillibrand. They are going to laugh at us, and scorn us, and gloat, and celebrate taking down one of their most vocal and capable critics in the US senate. But come next November, the American people will still have the option of voting for a party that actually backs up its platform statements with action, and without that, this country is truly and finally doomed.

I loved Al Franken. I was enjoying the rumors that he might run for president. I was proud to vote for him and still, today, believe he was an excellent senator.

At the same time, I am appalled by his behavior. I understand the calls for him to step down, and I understand his decision to heed them. I won’t paint him as a victim in this, but I will recognize that sometimes good people do bad things—and sometimes, due to circumstances beyond our control, they have to suffer larger consequences for those things than they truly deserve.