With today’s shameful NRA response to the Newtown Massacre, a response drenched in delusional, paranoid fearmongering, promoting escalation of gun ownership instead of gun restrictions, the irony stings that these fearmongers are the folks we should actually be most afraid of.

And so, I find myself reaching for a different message, a message of love and peace and the transformative power they hold.

I’ve written before — Stuff We Need: Love, and Long Live Hippies! — of my fondness for the hippie movement, but more importantly the transcendent ideas they aspired to, ideas that preceded them by millennia, and so for today’s Video Fridays installment I’ve chosen one of my favorite expressions of these ideas, John Lennon’s classic: Imagine.

The Wikipedia article on the song contains this explanatory quote from Lennon:

The concept of positive prayer … If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion—not without religion but without this my God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing—then it can be true.

And that’s what we need today. A positive prayer, to counteract the horrible dystopian vision the NRA and others are spreading.

Peace!