Every few weeks our lives are interrupted by breaking news
about innocent people being gunned down in classrooms, movie theaters, night
clubs, churches and most recently an outdoor concert. During these highly
stressful times, we stop what we are doing to reflect on the preciousness and
fragility of life, we offer our prayers and condolences to the families
affected by the tragedy and we tell ourselves this isn’t America. We recite
this claim with the convictions people give to their religious mantras. We
repeat this lie hoping to convince ourselves that we were somehow different, but
this is America. This is who we are and we need to accept it. Insanity isn’t
just doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Insanity
is also denying the truth right in front of us.
Violence is a constitutive part of our history. America grew
out of a violent revolution and hasn’t looked back. In the Gospel
of Saint Luke, we are told that we can know a tree by the fruit it
produces. In America, we scorn and rebuke our rotten apples, but we refuse to
indict the tree that produced them. We have to quit using the same shocked
language we apply to these tragedies and come to grips with the fact that this
is normal. America is, and always has been, a violent nation.
Our culture has glamourized violence through novels,
television, movies and video games. The spike in mass shootings over the last
decade is a generational consequence of celebrating death more than life. America’s
fascination with violence consciously and unconsciously affects many of us in different
ways. It starts out as innocent games of cowboys and Indians or cops and
robbers. We send these same kids to schools that have canonized our nation’s
most historic battlegrounds and immortalized the soldiers who fought and died
on those sacred grounds. We have Civil War reenactments where we simulate the
experience of being on some of America’s most deadly killing fields. For every
person truly repulsed by depictions of violence there are throngs of people
cancelling out their voices.
Contrary to what we tell ourselves, the majority of mass shootings
aren’t committed by people with a history of mental illness. These are meticulously
calculated events designed to inflict as much pain and terror as possible. Too
often we jump to the conclusion that the shooter must have been “crazy.” This
is disingenuous. Saying someone is crazy is an easier pill to swallow than
accepting the fact that our culture continues producing more and more people
capable of committing these crimes.
There are so many Americans invested in the myths associated
with America that (as a nation) we can’t look critically at this problem. Too
many people are working overtime to systematically disconnect these shootings
from each other- and often the motives behind them. America is under siege by
the threat of random violence and we won’t accept the fact that our culture is
complicit in some of the carnage we have seen.
America is stuck in a perpetual cycle of grief, inaction and denial.
Our politicians don’t have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and we won’t
look in the mirror. These stories start with a hail of bullets and end in death
and prayers. We keep doing the same thing over and over and have the nerve to
question the results.
