Pray if you want, no one is asking you to stop. No one is judging you because you do.  We are imploring you to see your prayer is SIMPLY NOT ENOUGH! Take action where you can and demand action where u cannot. If you cannot start doing that here and now, then you have rejected the first gift given to you by the God you claim to live for. Unless you act, as empowered by the God you follow – your faith is worthless here. In fact, the responsibility for all living things is the ONLY thing your faith has that is valuable to this earth. on some level you know being responsible here is the true test of your faith. Yet, you have so eloquently squandered it all.

Two decades of politically correct polarization, fed by the POV’s of Fox News and MSNBC have dulled most of us to the most basic of human truths.  At our cores, we are all the same.  We all love, we all fear, we all desire.  And we all face that struggle through our own lenses, whatever they may be.  It is our job in life to balance the needs of those three basic drives.  The truth about this is that we all fear individually, but what society fears most is complexity.  Collectively we fear complexity in all its forms, until the moment it frees us as individuals to be human and to make our own mistakes. 

Lest we fall into an argument of unfounded ideologies and nationalist mythologies, it is important to point out a few facts.  The National Anthem is "The Star Spangled Banner." It was written in response to a scene in the War of 1812, and was not a direct result of the Revolutionary War.  It is not a product of our original government and was not made the official anthem until the 1930’s when a group of vets collected over five million signatures to make it the Nation's first National Anthem.  Most football games only use the first stanza of the song which ends with a question, not a statement:

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?