The thing about hell, you see, is repetition.

Insanely and inanely tedious, pure maddening recurrence and unlike heaven’s infinite, hell is only endless. Not even one damn thing after another, all of it’s monotony. A repeated madness, hell is a purely demonized foolishness, purely unredeemed sameness. A parody of the eternal, it’s anger that’s just done over and over again. And again and again.

The damned that Dante saw were tormented endlessly by bitter rehearsals all fit to their crimes. Angry souls forever mired in the Styx, doomed to sing broken hymns; bickering, mutually offended souls sparring by the side of hell’s dark road, narcissistic bigots wrestling for some futile last word. Dante saw betrayers biting and bitten, gnawing each other unvaryingly, unceasingly: all of it amaranthine.

Hell is on a loop. Uncreative, pathetic reruns of the worst inhumanities, it’s a sort of dull deathless numbness. Think of the anger born of some repeated slight, some repeated irritation, and imagine it interminable. That’s hell: an eternity not infinite, just endless. Unstoppable horror.

A myth to many fools, hell is becoming harder to deny or disbelieve. The evidence is there, seen on our screens, now almost on schedule. The same madness, the same tears, the same sham piety, the same political cowardice, the same impenitence, all of it very much like hell if not simply hell itself. All that’s new are people and places, victims and mourners, poor random sacrifices offered up for our momentary outrage and pathetically forgettable catharsis.

Our overused cultural liturgies are now meaningless. Our politics are now thoroughly corrupt. Sunken, it seems, into a numbing moral morass, unable to muster anything more than rote emotivism, we are collectively imitating a sort of hell on earth. Each now knows the sinister song by heart; verse by verse, with our fickle anger and fickle emotions, we play the chorus to this traveling tragedy, all of it the nonsense of our end.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter, that’s what it says on the gates of hell. And it’s what’s being inscribed on the hearts of Americans, each time we cry and each time we do nothing. Yes, it is very much the fault of our politicians, those bought accomplices of every death. But it’s just as much our fault too, we pathetic citizens, drunk on the drama of it all, but who refuse to vote, refuse to argue, refuse to do anything other than play the pathetic game of thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers, turning even our piety into a sort of demonic, apathetic routine.

Forgive me the absence of any comfort, that my words speak too much hellish doom, that they do not try to wipe away your tears. If religious, you will, of course, keep your hope in that light which even this darkness cannot conquer. If not, you can do whatever it is you do to stay sane; worship yourself or a rock or nothing, it’s up to you. Whatever your metaphysics, though, now’s not the time for cheap emotional complacency, not the time for the shallow slogans of idiotic optimism.

Rather, out of respect for the dead and out of an ethical disrespect for ourselves, may we at least have the decency to remain uncomfortable, to remain in mourning, to remain angry about this and little else, undistracted by the next stupid tweet or the next mindless celebrity.

Instead, may we be good enough to live this hell soberly. At least until we finally shut up and do something genuinely hopeful, something less like hell.

This column originally appeared in The Dallas Morning News.