American sickness
PROLOGUE: Yesterday, I read someone’s post online, complaining about a musician who had posted about the Nashville shooting. The person was criticizing the musician and the gist of it was this: “it’s a virtue-signaling layup to make an anti-gun post after a school shooting.” And maybe there’s some truth scattered in there. But what’s a voice for if not to be used? Even if the problem doesn’t budge. Even if the power doesn’t listen. I’ve written so many letters to my representatives—Mitt Romney and Mike Lee and Burgess Owens—about gun control and received form-letter replies that brushed me (and the deaths of children) off with canned rhetoric and an insincere pat on the head. So, forgive me if this post feels virtue-signaling or performative or too angry. It’s purposely only the latter. The state of gun control in the United States feels helpless, as the people in power do nothing to change a blood-drenched status quo. So, yeah, I’m gonna use my voice. It’s all I’ve got.
One nation under guns
With liberty and justice
For some.
With rights protected by our vaunted Bill of Rights (not to mention a healthy army of social media bots whose handles are @NAMEandthenabunchofnumbers.)
Seems like maybe we’re better at protecting inanimate rights
Than we are at protecting children1.
More interested, that’s for sure.
We can’t be too far away from catchy Back To School slogans like…
”For just a few dollars more,
Our school will seat your kid away from the door.”
"And now by popular request,
Bulletproof uniforms and bulletproof desks!”
”A nationwide 1-to-1 educational program run
But instead of laptops, starter handguns.”
“All teachers carrying.”
All principals burying.
How did we get here?
It can’t help that we feed an imbalanced love for the Second Amendment or that we’re surrounded by lobbyists and special interests and the money-mongering, bloodstained NRA and their agenda and talking points.
”The founding fathers meant
For me to have a full armament.”
(Even though their guns took 3 minutes
Just to get one single shot in it.)
”Amendments cannot change.”
(What does amend mean anyway?)
”Guns don’t kill people…people kill people.”
”You gonna ban cars too?”
”It’s not a gun problem; it’s a mental health problem!”
”Owning a gun makes you safer.”
”The solution for a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
”Gun laws don’t work because criminals don’t obey the law anyway.”
I’ve heard them all. You’ve heard them all. They’re exhausting. And they’re nothing but smoke. They’re in denial of a true American sickness.
Meanwhile people are dying. Kids are dying. It could’ve been my twins yesterday.
To think, Columbine wasn’t enough.
To think, Sandy Hook2 wasn’t enough.
To think, Parkland wasn’t enough.
To think, Uvalde3 wasn’t enough.
To think, the Covenant School—yesterday in Nashville where three 9-year olds (again, my twins’ age) are dead along with three adults, oh, and also the 28-year old shooter—won’t be enough.
Think and pray
Just a little bit harder
Think and pray
Just a little bit louder
Think and pray and pray and think4
I’m sure someday, it’ll do something.
(Don’t lift a finger. God’s got everything.)
The blood of schoolchildren
Is acceptable collateral damage
So you can strut around
With your alpha-dog guns5
Like some pseudo-military rooster
Peacocking our kids to death.
Assault rifles on your Christmas cards.
Peace on earth!
Assault rifles on your tie clips.
Thoughts and prayers!
It’s all hollow.
We live in a country where people have to ask:
”Which shooting?”
…where the day that children are shot down at school, people rush to say:
”It’s too soon.”
”You’re politicizing tragedy.”
Politicizing the senseless death of innocent kids who were just trying to learn long division?
Politicizing the idea that maybe it ought to be even just a little bit harder for people to get their hands on guns6?
Politicizing carnage so horrific that already-grieving parents have had to give DNA just so that they could know which corpse was their child’s?
More than half a century ago, in his song “Blowin’ In The Wind”, Bob Dylan asked, “How many deaths will it take ‘til he knows that too many people have died?” Still slaps, as the kids say.
Substitute “children” for “people” in that Dylan lyric and feel how it sits.
America’s answer to Dylan’s question appears to be “as many as it takes.”
Liberty and the pursuit of happiness, those tenets of our Declaration of Independence, mean absolutely nothing without life.
I’m trying not to be defeatist. To not feel so dispirited, despondent. To not throw in the towel. I really am.
And so I use my words. Here, to vent. To spit. But then I write my representatives yet again (and click Send after editing out the curse words). Push for reform. Plead for change. For something. For anything. This country, its children need yards upon yards of change, but I suppose we’re gonna need to start with centimeters and then just keep moving the line of progress forward.
We’ll return to our regularly scheduled music and pop culture posts soon.
Why is it that every state requires you to have an approved safety car seat before they’ll let you leave the hospital with a newborn baby BUT every day the states roll bloody dice, as we send our children to school with the fear that they’ll lose this deadly lottery?
This commentary from a British journalist makes the rounds every time there’s a new American shooting. It’s simultaneously hard to believe and hard not to believe.
All I have to do is write the community name and you know exactly what I’m talking about. Why are we ok with that?
For the record, I am not against thoughts and prayers at all. I believe in their power. I have felt it both coming towards me and coming from me. But, I am against ONLY thoughts and prayers. I am against thoughts and prayers with nothing else. And, as long as we’re getting prayer-y and Christian, I think it’s particularly worth nothing that the God of the Bible is also against JUST thoughts and prayers. In the book of James it says, “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” The reason people are sick of hearing about “thoughts and prayers” from our elected leaders after these shootings is more about the fact that no meaningful action accompanies the thoughts and prayers than any real critique of thoughts/prayers. I can’t comprehend how someone, elected to help the people and in actual possession of the power to make a difference, could stand idly by.
I once sat in a Sunday School lesson where the subject of emergency food storage was being discussed. In the back of the classroom, a hand shot up and its owner said something like, “I don’t need food storage. All I need is my gun.” And the guy, purportedly a Christian, was NOT talking about hunting. He was talking about how his gun could get him what he needed from others by force. The sadder part was the room was half uncomfortable cringe emojis but also half high-fiving laughter.
You want a hunting rifle? No problem. Let’s just make the process of acquiring a gun as rigorous as, say, getting a driver’s license. Let’s do universal background checks and waiting periods. Then you go and gitcherdeer to your heart’s content. Nobody’s coming for your guns. But we’ve got to admit that America has a gun problem or nothing will ever get better. And, sure, if you wanna enact a whole bunch of mental health resources too, awesome. I’m all for it.