It has grown darker; the world is a little sadder. Maybe it’s just me, my balance might be in jeopardy. I read, as long as I could, the names of the children, looked at the pictures, the bright smiling faces. It was too hard. I couldn’t go on. Tears made the screen look blurred, distorted. I had to stop. My muscles ache from tension, my teeth hurt from clenching my jaw. Things don’t make sense anymore.
Meanwhile the body count grows.
It just won’t slow down. A bill to combat domestic terrorism came to a screeching halt when it was blocked by Senate Republicans. How hard is it to agree that terrorism is bad? If the terrorists are Americans who buy guns legally, they’re all right with Mitch McConnell and company. Good, solid American terrorists, salt of the earth.
Additionally, Congress won’t let the CDC use funds to research firearm violence, if it finds evidence that guns are the problem. It was couched in Washington speak, “none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.” If they found that more guns were the answer the bills sponsor Representative Jay Dickey, republican, Arizona, would most likely been willing to airlift pallets of cash to Atlanta. Instead, they pulled 2.6 million dollars, the amount spent on firearm injury research during the previous year. Congress doesn’t have to screw around with subtlety.
States are passing laws prohibiting physicians from discussing the perils of keeping a gun in the home. There is a worry that if people find out how dangerous guns can be they might not want to own so damned many. Why that bothers state, and federal governments so much has only one explanation, the NRA. Precisely, the campaign contributions, which are enormous. There are so many forces at work to keep the guns and bullets accessible, so many powerful forces, so much money.
Somebody needs to start a movement. Who can forget the power and dignity of Black Lives Matter? Indeed, something so basic, Black Lives Matter, and they do. They shouldn’t have had to say it, but they did, it had to be said. Because it seemed as if that simple fact had escaped the constabulary. So many innocent black men, and sometimes children were dying that it gave birth to a movement. It was America at it’s best. People ready to risk arrest, tear gas, bludgeoning with a Billy club, it rang with memories of the Edmund Pettus bridge. I was proud to be an American.
In 2006 women had finally had enough, banding together to form the #MeToo movement. Harvey Weinstein had been having his way with women for years. Using his authority and connections to force women to have sex with him. It turns out that he was only one of thousands of abusers. He was an overweight, unwholesome tip of the iceberg. Women came forward in waves to reveal they had been abused. It was a moment of national catharsis, unless you had been an abuser, and it turned out that number was stupefying, but to the rest of the men, it was a moment of humiliation and a chance to understand things had to change. We couldn’t allow the kinder, gentler half of our world to be abused. I was ashamed to be a man, but proud to watch these brave souls fight for their rights.
It is time for something like that. I know there is some angry, brilliant human who thinks this has gone on for too long. Someone to stand up, and lead us into the future, where children are safe in school. Not because of armed guards and chain link fences, mine fields surrounding the playground. A world where teachers are armed with #2 pencils and boxes of crayons and a scraped knee on the playground is the worst injury.
I have a strange feeling it will be a woman, an angry woman who is sick of the bullshit. Like these women. They were at a protest outside the NRA convention in Houston, and a man, a gun owner was going to tell them how wrong they were. After a brief, heated, vocal exchange they took his megaphone, his sense of superiority and possibly his self-respect and sent him on his way. In that 15 second video I found more hope than I have had for weeks.
Things have gone too far, someone needs to do something. Black people are being gunned down, just because they’re black. Asians are being targeted, for the crime of being Asian; children are being hunted in schools. The United States has become a free gun zone. Nobody can feel safe anywhere. Violence has become the norm. We need to stand up to the powerful, we need to let them know at the ballot box that we have had enough. It must be us, the many, against, them, the well-funded few, who pretend they are working for us.
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Phil Roeder on Flickr under CC License
