Another shooting, further proof of the dangerous social pathologies in the American body politic, could be just a number. But instead, it’s awakening the spirit of love long dormant and suppressed by fear and a narrow understanding of freedom.
Last week, I had to write a new sermon. The gospel was about the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry and his call to repentance: turning away from sin and toward God. Which is, you know, a big part of the season. Then a 19-year-old kid shot up his old school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
After seeing a grieving mother with ashes on her forehead, I realized the picture preached to me. Remember it was Ash Wednesday — the day Christians all over the world are reminded of their mortality and the need to repent of sin and turn toward God.
And it was St. Valentine’s Day — the annual celebration of love — and the feast of an early Christian martyr. It’s the day we honor a man who resisted the empire’s persecution of Christians by secretly marrying them. And for that rebellious act, he was murdered by the state.
Last Wednesday was a day of fasting and deep reverence for life, creation, and the consistent reminder of forgiveness. And it was also the day a young man hated so much he murdered his former classmates. It wasn’t just any day.
This day of solemn reminder yielded yet another reminder of the need for repentance. This time on a grand scale embodied in yet one more tyranny of hate.
Tears and Cowards
I preached about it. Of course, I did. There was no real choice in the matter. You can read it here.
But the tears didn’t come on Sunday quite as easily as they did Thursday. Not because of callousness, but the growing sense that this isn’t just private grief and individual speculation. This isn’t only about me.
I cried on Thursday out of fear for my children. My own children, having to take part in active shooter drills; fearing for the trauma they may yet experience. For the lasting trauma they will endure, like the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and many other schools have had to endure. Trauma that will be with them, changing them.
The trauma they must carry because we’re cowards.
By Sunday, that was changing.
The Small s
I’ve spent the week since the shooting watching the teenage victims do what they’ve been taught. Like the first students to deserve an A in Civics in a generation.
Students and teachers and parents speaking up for their right — our right — to freedom. Freedom from being shot at school or our workplace. Freedom from enduring violent trauma at school. In a country so obsessed with freedom, we’re missing the danger right in front of us.
We’re so interested in maintaining our freedoms, we’re losing our freedom.
What a big deal that S makes.
It’s like speaking of sins blinds us to our sin — our talk of individual freedoms blinds us to the very nature of freedom.
How we understand freedom becomes obscured, de-centered, and divorced from its common (and commonly-held) meaning. Precisely because we’ve sold freedom to each other like a definable commodity, tallied and counted.
This linguistic and intellectual shift in meaning and communication doesn’t stem from the ignorance of a “side” but is the intentional muddying and narrowing of the common conversation. It is the redefining of freedom to mean less than it does.
Freedom isn’t the sum of its parts or the articulation of a singular value. It’s the increasing safety and ability to thrive in our world. And every time we expand the freedoms to bully and discriminate and threaten we are reducing our collective freedom.
The Forest v. the Trees
The brilliance of the cliche “we miss the forest for the trees” is that it often embodies its meaning.
We miss its point. Our rabbit hole digressions and hyper-specific policy talk steal our energy from seeing what’s really there.
I imagine it like a forest fire obscured by staring at the trees in front of us which look just fine from where we’re sitting! Or pretending like these trees in front of us and the acres of trees nearby aren’t at all related to one another. Like disease doesn’t spread and can’t be prevented, so…
But the forest isn’t defined by a single tree, nor is true freedom defined by open carry.
Both the uniqueness of the U.S.’s social pathologies and the narrowing idea of freedom mean we aren’t hearing each other or recognizing the problem, let alone the solution.
My responses to Umair Haque’s essay “Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse” have dealt with the uniqueness and decentering of our common culture. But it’s a newer essay which makes this obscuring point more directly.
The Fool’s Bargain
In a piece titled “Are Young People Giving Up On Democracy?”, Haque points out the flaw in the recent polls showing decreasing support for democracy among younger Americans. And his subtitle says it all:
“Which Would You Choose, Peasantry or Serfdom?”
He writes:
“Young people are giving up on democracy because democracy isn’t working for young people. It is giving them a false choice between peasantry and serfdom — thinking itself very clever, indeed — but that precisely is why they are rejecting it. What they really want is a chance for change beyond this stifling fool’s bargain.”
The problem, he argues, is not that millennials necessarily reject the concept of democracy — they reject how we’ve confused neoliberal capitalism for democracy. They reject how they as a generation have been saddled with the effects of our economics of exploitation and a pathology of cruelty which has subbed for the word democracy.
Like the Big Bad Wolf dressing as Grandma, our young adults can see the sharp teeth and evil intentions of fake freedom wrapped in a flag.
Recentering
My plan, in wrapping up this series of reflections, was to give us direction and encouragement. Maybe offering “6 things we can do to reshape our country”. But then there was the shooting and the ashes and the tears.
And there were those young people reacting to the naked politics of their legislators by speaking up — in public and social media.
So, in other words, things changed. And a big part of that change is the sense that something may be happening.
Something beyond tormenting the tone-deaf tweeting of “thoughts and prayers” by members of Congress who had just passed legislation which ensures another shooting will happen sooner than later.
These young people are laying bare the truth to the lies and misinformation about what victims really want. About what we all really want.
The movement organizing and the public actions are one part. But more important is the engagement and the re-centering. The listening and the sharing and crying and shouting and naming the problem of gun violence isn’t a false choice between gun control and nothing.
None of our pathologies, these unique examples of sickness in the American body politic, is this false choice. A choice of rigid partisan-sorting which the plurality of us completely reject.
We know that a bevy of reforms dealing with access to and use of firearms is the center of the conversation, not the left-wing.
Just like we know
that dealing with the opioid crisis isn’t just about laws and blaming people for addiction,
Seniors forced into a migratory, nomadic life is emblematic of a deeper problem of dignity in our country,
Our exploitation of workers and people to enrich the wealthiest Americans is causing stunning anxiety,
And the predatory cruelty of our culture is far, far from the compassionate words from “The New Colossus” which have emboldened generations of Americans, new and old alike:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
Or the longing for freedom which has driven our Roosevelts and Reagans alike to build and rebuild democracy in hope and opportunity.
The Moment
This isn’t the hopeless moment of death, but the rebirthing of American democracy from its killing fields of cruelty and despair. The dawning of a new age of compassion and freedom. The waking from a nightmare born of the epigenetically-inherited trauma of ego and individualism.
We are waking and yearning and declaring that this strange collapse is not inevitable. It isn’t destined or pre-ordained. We need not be the new Rome, whose arrogance and cruelty fed its own demise.
We are looking past those trees, knowing that it is because of those trees that we also care for all the trees.
But not just the trees — the forest. With all its inhabitants and habitations. We care for the entire eco-system of creatures and vegetation so different from us. This is the very substance of the forest our blindness for the trees obscures.
And because we care for the forest, we care for all forests, even those we will never see and life we will never meet.
Who we are is coming clearer. Because the cowards never rule forever.
And the only thing the lovers are giving up on is this narrow, cruel vision of self. We turn from it, reject it, and then move toward a growing way of love and compassion. Sparked to new life.