Since It Won’t Change
Everyday you day anything. Everyday that you bring your kids to school, that you shop for groceries. What you are doing is placing yourself and your children and your spouse and your elderly father in danger. You put them in danger of being there when someone opens fire. Today at the daycare I saw a dad look back and think about holding the door for me and my family as we were making our way into daycare. We were a solid eight steps away, he let the door close. That’s what the daycare wants us to do for every family, for every individual. If they don’t have the code, they don’t get in. Manners takes over when you see someone carrying a kid in -15 degree weather and you just want to let them in so the parent doesn’t have to take their hand out of their glove to punch in the code.
But it’s hopeless. Our hope for safety is wrapped up in Congress and that’s hopeless. And I tell you, I don’t think it’s exclusively because of the seven figure amounts that the NRA is funneling to a lot of our country’s Congresspeople. That’s not good, that doesn’t help. But I think that even though 90% of the country wants universal background checks, that 90% as a collective doesn’t have the appetite to go to war with the gun enthusiasts. There’s someone at NRA headquarters right now, throwing grounds in the coffeemaker, hoping there isn’t a shooting at their kids school today; hoping the grocery store their grandmother goes to doesn’t get shot up. They are part of the 90% that wants gun control. But I can tell you it’s not changing, they will sweat this out, they will take the shout downs from their constituents. They’ll take Beto O’Rourke’s moral high ground. In the end, there’s carnage we accept. And that carnage includes children. That carnage includes grandmother’s grabbing the groceries in Buffalo. And one day the carnage we accept will include your child, or my child, or your neighbor.
We can stop selling guns, but we won’t. We can start doing background checks, but we won’t.
I was born in 1981. I was raised in Williamstown, a college town in Massachusetts. Putting together what I saw and what my parents told me I thought we were on the part of the arc of the moral universe where things were getting better. I thought racism was dying a fast-enough-for-my-white-family death. I didn’t realize that Reagan and the movement that elected him was doubling down on racism. I didn’t realize that some of the most promising leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement had died violent deaths at the hands of our government. That some had been terrorized by our government, that some were in self-imposed exile. I thought this way for too long. I thought this way cause I’m an optimist, I thought this way cause I saw improvements in the corner of the world I live in. But there is a violence, an evil in this country that I don’t understand, that we won’t look directly at. Gun violence is just part of it. Our rates of violence, our justifications of wars, our tenure as the police force of planet earth, it will all be studied, and it won’t be favorable.
I’d like to change subjects cause I have nothing more to say at this moment about gun violence.
I don’t think we’ll be dealing with gun violence in fifty years. I remember talking to my dad about the grindingly terrible relations between Israel and Palestine. My dad said that he thought the conflict wouldn’t last 50 years. He couldn’t say what direction it was going, but it wasn’t going to stay put. And I feel the same about where we are in America. Are we going to be cataloging mass shootings by the hundreds a year in five decades. I’m apt to think no. We’ll be dead, or we’ll have moved to another country and only the armed, or they’ll be less guns, or more reasonable gun control. And I know the numbers of dead in mass shootings are paltry compared to suicides, compare to domestic violence. I also think that when people have some reasonable expectation that someone might open fire in their kid’s school, at their aunt’s grocery store, they’ll relate to the world different. These days when we are faced with reality I think about the Americans who have fought against all odds to make this country better. They have kept on going and pushed for change. There will be hundreds of such people today, at George Floyd Square, pushing Minneapolis and this entire country to live up to its ideals. But I don’t think we want to live up to our ideals. We want to conveniently cling to the ideals that better us personally. No one ever wanted to live up to the ideals.
We’ve been a democracy since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Since then there’s been near constant agitation towards black voter disenfranchisement. Progress in the directions I’d like to see has been uniquely elusive in this time. I don’t think America is exceptional. I think Americans are exceptional. I think the reprehensible chattel slavery that thrived here and in a handful of other countries created amazing people, amazing music, amazing families. I’m not moving. I want to change America. But it’s not to make America live up to its ideals. Its to give America ideals and then start living up to them. There’s isn’t a back that is worth going to. Onward, and away from violence, and towards truth and reconciliation, towards reparations, towards an end to patriarchy, towards an end to disenfranchisement, towards a world where we treat our melting pot with the care, love and self-preservation that we see from some of the more homogeneous Scandinavian nations. Onward and afraid.