“It’s Deja Vu All Over Again”

NOV 22 WRITTEN BY ROBERT MILLER

In 2018 I wrote an anti-gun violence song called “Tree Of Life” in the aftermath of the then latest mass shooting at the Tree Of Life synagogue in Pittsbugh, PA. It’s a spare, mournful song featuring only piano and voice.

I wrote it because I was disgusted by the sheer number of mass shootings in this country. My song was a plea for sanity and gun control. I released it in 2019 on the album PGS 7 by my band, Project Grand Slam.

When I started my Follow Your Dream podcast in March 2021 one of the first episodes featured my song in response to yet another mass shooting.

Now, here we are in 2022 - four years after I wrote my song - and mass shootings and gun violence have neither ended nor even subsided. The latest mass shooting took place just this past weekend at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado. It marks the 641st mass shooting in the U.S. this year. And that’s after 691 mass shootings last year!

When will this insanity end? When will the politicians finally do something meaningful to stop the gun violence? Why does the U.S. have more mass shootings than any other country? There are no satisfactory answers.

So the carnage continues. Deja vu all over again.