Another voice added to the choir...

I’ve been gone from this place for too long. Hiding from myself and from having to face down and admit things I’d rather keep denying or ignoring. In the interim my father has passed away, my family has splintered, my friends have gone their own ways, and my life despite losing so much has become a bit more fulfilled. I’m in a good place. That’s all I’m saying about myself right now, because I don’t want to this to turn into a “Here’s what you missed” episode. Rather I feel compelled to join the chorus, if for no other reason than to say I spoke out. I often claim that voting means nothing. We live in a representative democracy where we elect leaders that are supposed to have our best interests at heart, but due to a quirk in the rules, put there by design, we don’t actually directly elect our leaders. I’m not going to decry our system. There are faults in it, that much is sure, but there is no system that is flawless. We’re better than most in a lot of ways and we seem content to rest on the laurels that afford us.

We’re lucky. We live in a country where healthy discourse is encouraged, at least in theory, and we can be the voice of dissent without fear of real repercussion. We are exceedingly lucky to be here, but too often we argue for our own exceptionalism as something that’s innate rather than something we earn. Since the events of September 11^th, 2001 our world has changed. We are no longer the unquestioned super power in the world. Sure, we brought to bear the might of our military against those that sought to harm us, but we’re almost fifteen years down the road from that fateful day and the world is no safer. We’ve gone backwards.

I recall the early aftermath of 9/11. Pundits and newscasters made the case that were targeted for a multitude of reasons, “They hate our freedom” “They’re jealous of what we have” and most of these explanations made sense at the time. It satisfied two needs that had developed. On the one hand it explained away something so senseless and horrifying. It provided us with a context within which to place something that up to that point only one generation of US denizens had experienced previously. On the other hand it consoled us by reminding us that ours was the greatest land, the best place, the ultimate utopia of everything good in the world. We readily accepted these claims as fact and an undertone of fear began to percolate.

We got daily updates of military actions overseas, but with them we also got reminders that no place in the world was safe. From bombings to shootings, we were constantly reminded that the next attack could happen anywhere and come from anyone. That fear began to take hold and strangle us.

I remember being sixteen and questioning a lot of what the government was doing. I decried the Bush administration and their actions, I lambasted the government and their rhetoric, I sought to tear down anyone that championed the superiority of the country without taking responsibility for the atrocities we had committed previously and were continuing to execute. I was vicious. A petulant little child that disagrees with so much of where the world is headed and yet speaks about things like foreign politics with the learnedness of someone that has only a passing familiarity with the subject.

I got older, I grew up, and I learned more. I learned about the history of our country and their hand in ousting governments they didn’t like, how they subverted movements and revolutions in order to protect their own interests. I learned these things and I became more and more disillusioned with the world I lived in and the government that increasingly appeared poised to assert their dominance of it. I had learned a valuable lesson in my teens. I had to temper my response, pick my battles, and choose which points and causes were worth devoting energy to.  It was this temperance that kept me from being plagued a second time by my own exuberance.

We live in an age where recent memory is almost disappearing because of how much documentation we have of things. The internet has become the ultimate record of human achievement and the deepest pit of our shortcomings. Once something is posted here, it’s here forever. That said, the question has to be asked, how did we get here? I’m not talking about arriving at the internet age, I’m talking about how we arrived at a place where something that happened just fifteen years ago and all the events that followed it can be so easily and readily ignored or forgotten. I’m talking about how there have been countless mass shootings in the past decade and a half and yet we’re no closer to owning our collective complicity in them.

The same rhetoric is always espoused, “This was the act of a deeply troubled person” “This was a lone gunmen suffering from mental issues” “This was a home grown terrorist” “We need to legislate more gun control” “We need to limit the public’s access to assault style weapons” it all goes into the same echo chamber. We tie ourselves in knots over these things and after a week or two we come out the other side with nothing done to really address the problem. I don’t pretend to know the right answer to the problem. We’re too different and varied a people for me to say that a broad reaching blanket solution will be completely effective. I have friends that own guns and are enthusiastic about it. They treat them with respect and they have never and will never discharge a single round in anger. I also know a few people that the sheer notion of them holding or wielding a gun makes me cringe and shudder.

We’re right back at the crux of the argument though. One side says “No guns, ever!” and the other side says “All the guns! Always!” and they champion their ideas to their own acolytes and try to win their argument in the court of public opinion with things like rhetoric and grandstanding. They espouse statistics and studies that support their claims, they rail against their opponents as being too militant or backwards, or the claim is made that those that want nothing to do with guns will invariably change their tune when faced with a life or death situation. I won’t lie, both sides make compelling arguments.

In the end, we need to do something, and even if we make the wrong choice, nothing says we can’t correct it. We have a history of this. The eighteenth amendment made alcohol illegal in the United States, and for thirteen years the law stood. When at last we realized that we couldn’t actually enforce it and the reasons for its passing weren’t all that founded, we repealed it. We did something, discovered it didn’t work, and we changed it. That’s one of the amazing things about this country, or used to be anyway, we would try things, we would attempt seemingly impossible actions and if we failed we’d take what we learned from our failure and try again. It’s how we got to the moon, how we got the A-bomb, how we managed to navigate the Cold War without unleashing nuclear Armageddon. We recognized that we are human, we are flawed, and the best we can do is to learn from any mistake we might make.

Sadly, those days have passed. We now sit languishing under a government beholden to multinational mega corporations and special interest groups, like the gun lobby, and despite shootings and massacres being almost a common occurrence in recent years, we’re no closer to preventing them than we were a hundred years ago. We have ineffective leaders and a divided country that makes any movement, for good or bad, next to impossible.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing my father make comments that showcased an inactive, if not token, racism. He’d deride other races and cultures with pejoratives and insults forgetting that his wife was of a different race, and his children were of a mixed heritage. While I would listen to these things from him and truthfully not think very critically about them, I never adopted them as my own ideas. He might speak harshly about blacks or Asian at night, but I’d go to school with kids from these races and some of them were great friends of mine, or even someone I had a great affection for. So it never reconciled with me. I never took his terms to really be applicable to anyone I knew. While I’ll admit I never called him out on his use of the terms, it was easier to treat him like that senile grandmother that still uses antiquated 1960’s racial terms because it’s just what she’s used to.

Unfortunately, my brother did assimilate those ideas as his own. So did my sister to a lesser extent. Both of them look down on anyone that isn’t white, and for the most part they deny their own Latino heritage. I’ll be the first to say I don’t wave a flag of pride for mine, but I don’t deny it. I accept it’s a part of me and I’m responsible for how I choose to acknowledge it.

Responsibility is really what all of this boils down to. Personal or collective responsibility for the actions taken by others and allowed by our own inaction is what needs to be examined. We live in a world where shootings are just part of the background noise. A world where bigotry and racism are becoming more accepted because of public figures, a world where classes are suddenly needed to explain to people what constitutes sexual consent, a world where every ill that’s perpetrated is either not the fault of society, the result of blind ignorance, or the product of fanaticism.

The fact that there are universal things we all hate but are still collectively allowed is beyond me. No one likes being shot, but somehow we can’t come together to say that we agree on a list of criteria that must be met before buying a gun. If someone got on TV and called for the unilateral outlawing of Christianity there’d be riots in the streets and completely civil unrest, yet we do nothing when that very thing is proposed, albeit in not so many words, in regards to Islam. We pick and choose what to care about based on what directly impacts us. If you’re Muslim or you have someone in your life that you care deeply about who is, suddenly you have a vested interest in preventing their persecution.

Ignorance is okay in things like forgetting to order your burger without ketchup. Ignorance is fine when you call a business to find out what time they close. Ignorance is perfectly acceptable when you go to your doctor and ask for more information about the treatment you’ve been prescribed. There’s nothing wrong with ignorance, so long as you don’t attempt to use it as a crutch that allows for plainly stupid action to be explained away. No one should have to tell you that killing is wrong. You shouldn’t need to be explicitly told that having sex with an unconscious person is not okay, and if you actually do need to be told these things, I don’t think you’re really all that fit to be part of society.

Fanaticism can be a good thing though. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the product of fanaticism. The internet meme “If Darryl dies we riot” is the product of fanaticism. Sports rivalries are the product of fanaticism. All of these things are born from the same place. We have a deep love and admiration for something and that devotion pushes it to be better. It can drive us all to be better. It doesn’t though. We consume the things we love and at best ignore or regard with indifference the things we don’t.

We’ve forgotten how to come together, how to work as a collective toward something greater than ourselves. I was born in the mid 80’s and grew up in the 90’s, but I think I might have been born in the dawn of the decline of humanity. On July 20^th, 1969 the first human being set foot on the moon. By all accounts the world collectively gathered around and watched this history event. We were one people achieving an amazing feat and despite the flags and symbols plastered on the side of the crafts that took those three men to that silent rock in space, we all felt like we were part of it. We had accomplished something that seemed insurmountable. In the decades since we’ve most closely recaptured that moment with the release of the next iPhone.

The term Orwellian is thrown around to decry an all-powerful totalitarian state as depicted in the novel 1984. The reality is that our world has come to resemble Huxley’s Brave New World more than Orwell’s own dystopia. We’ve drifted apart, lost regard for our common man, forgotten how to connect with each other and chosen to silo ourselves in with “Safe Spaces” and “Trigger Warnings”. We’re a splintered people, divided by our fears, empowered by the notion that our ideas are the only ones that are right, and consuming the same things but doing so under the belief that we’re discerning when we do so. It’s not too late though. We have all the time in the world to act, to try something, anything, until we’re out of time. Outlaw all the guns, take every single one and melt them down to make braces and rails for disabled and crippled kids. Conversely, outlaw no guns. Make everything legal. From tanks to missiles to APCs make it all legal and available to the general public. Park a F-22 Raptor on the same car lot as the Mercedes and see which one the hedge fund investor goes home with. We have to do something before we allow fear to take hold and strangle us from the inside. Doing nothing is what got us here to begin with.