This has to stop. It can’t continue to happen like this. Never again. But it never stops…
There is an ever-stronger consensus in America that real gun control is necessary—and an equally strong consensus that real gun control can never happen. Neither side of this discourse is winning, but neither is losing. We are caught in a feedback loop that’s tightened around all of us. (Of course there really is no we and that is part of the problem.)
Nobody can venture into the national conversation without being greeted with the same old platitudes, as dense and immovable as boulders. Gun control won’t stop criminals. Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. I don’t know about you, but I won’t feel safer if the government has a monopoly on weapons. These are empty words and empty sentiments. Gun control would indeed help mitigate criminal massacres of innocents. Assault rifles make it much easier to kill people.
Yet these facts make no dent on the real world. Right-wing Republicans have eagerly fed their constituents’ most unlikely illusions for years. They have shamelessly encouraged their loyal voters to believe the federal government, which provides them with pensions and free health care in their dotage, is their bitterest enemy, and to believe that tyrannical Washington bureaucrats are forever scheming to pick their pockets and swipe their handguns. Most unforgivably, they have idly encouraged their listeners to indulge in the horrible fantasy that, one day, they will get to shoot it out with their hated enemies.
The radical right has promoted this message day after day, month after month, year after year. On talk radio, on television, on Twitter, on every platform they can get their hands on. They have backed it up with suggestions that their political foes are not really American, are not worthy of even the most basic consideration as fellow human beings. I have lost track of the number of occasions when I thought Rush Limbaugh or Bill O’Reilly or Sarah Palin had finally gone too far, and that now public opinion would begin to turn against them. That will never happen. Going too far is what they do. It is all they do. They are paid to go too far.
This hideous propaganda campaign has changed the temper of the country. It has injected a new and terrible bitterness into countless people who feel left behind, excluded from whatever happiness it is that others enjoy. It has created a world in which people walk around shaking with blind, unquenchable rage at everything they are not and everything they cannot have. And it has given them ways to express that bitterness and rage.
Don’t read the comments, all my sensible friends say. Don’t read the anonymous comments that litter every single article on the Internet. But I do read them, sometimes. They tell us what is happening to our country in a way no calm, objective analysis ever could. They tell us what we are fast becoming.
Though not all of us feel that same rage and bitterness. Some of us are the objects of it. Ever since Barack Obama was elected president eight years ago, cynics have been telling us nothing has changed. Nothing could change, and only suckers could believe otherwise. We have been hearing that for eight years. Either Obama has done nothing at all, or he is just as bad as George W. Bush. (“Worse,” according to Noam Chomsky, and probably plenty of people on your Twitter feed.)
But something did change. The very fact of Obama as president, as the face of the country, as its comforter-in-chief, as its most prominent person, shook the country to its core. It drove some people mad. But it released some of us. America has changed profoundly since 2008. Racist and sexist words and actions that would once have been ignored have been powerfully exposed. Mainstream journalists used to speak of “tolerance” as if the LGBTQ community were perpetual outsiders who would have to be put up with; now that community feels like the real America mainstream journalists are struggling to catch up with. So many of us who were once outsiders are now at home here. It is our country we are fighting for, against a backlash that threatens to wipe out everything we have achieved.
President Obama has not been primarily responsible for these changes, but he has been, in a deep and mysterious way, at the center of them. Presidents set the tone for the entire country. Think of how Kennedy or Roosevelt affected their eras. As a man of tremendous grace and compassion (who has carefully avoided demonizing the people who hate him), Obama has worked a subtle change in the atmosphere. Consider, for example, how easily Obama has sidestepped the casual sexism that comes so easily to so many other prominent men. We did not get the kind of changes that some people thought they voted for in 2008, but we may have gotten something greater.
But every action, as we learned in physics class, unleashes an equal and opposite reaction. Nobody can know, really, what was going on in the head of the maniac who was responsible for this latest massacre, just as nobody knows what is really going on in the heads of the people who beat up demonstrators at Donald Trump rallies, or the people who spew hatred and venom out of every corner of the Internet. But we know what they are trying to destroy. They cannot abide the community of openness and tolerance that is blossoming in our troubled country.
Five years ago, a madman shot several people at a Safeway in my town. Some of them were people I had known and worked with; one of them was my congressional representative who, miraculously, survived. I have tried to write about it numerous times, but I have always abandoned the effort; it was too painful. Everything I wrote seemed inadequate; the words were hollow and meaningless next to the raw, horrible facts of what had happened.
That is why I hesitate to lecture anyone about what happened this week. The world we live in is too complex and fragile and precious to be turned into anybody’s opinion piece. But one thought is inescapable to me: The changes we have fought for in the past eight years are real and precious, and they must never be lost. We must nurture and appreciate them. And we must never give up.