death by hypocrisy
On Wednesday there was another shooting.
No, not that one. The one where a boy opened fire on his classmates, and ultimately, fatally, himself, in a high school not far from where I live—not far, in fact, from where I will someday be sending my own child to school.
This shooting doesn’t seem to be newsworthy outside of my local media market. I can understand why: None of the people involved was a darling of the Trump administration, an extremist far-right bozo whom the mainstream media is now sanitizing into some kind of free speech hero (because apparently nobody can hold two thoughts in their head at once: that a guy sucked and that it’s bad that he was murdered). I also understand, from the coldest possible perspective, that the Utah shooting had attention-getting elements that the Colorado one did not, from a highly public assassination to a prolonged manhunt.
And beneath all these differences separating the two events is a hard truth: That school shootings are not news anymore. They are quotidian, expected, accepted. At some point, maybe after Sandy Hook, maybe before that, a large enough percentage of the people who hold power in this country decided that it was not important to keep kids alive. They decided that their right to own a gun superseded a child’s right to grow up.
~ poetry break ~
Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild
By Kathy FishA group of grandmothers is a tapestry. A group of toddlers, a jubilance (see also: a bewailing). A group of librarians is an enlightenment. A group of visual artists is a bioluminescence. A group of short story writers is a Flannery. A group of musicians is — a band.
A resplendence of poets.
A beacon of scientists.
A raft of social workers.
A group of first responders is a valiance. A group of peaceful protestors is a dream. A group of special education teachers is a transcendence. A group of neonatal ICU nurses is a divinity. A group of hospice workers, a grace.
Humans in the wild, gathered and feeling good, previously an exhilaration, now: a target.
A target of concert-goers.
A target of movie-goers.
A target of dancers.
A group of schoolchildren is a target.
When I read about the shooting in Evergreen, I felt sad and heavy. The age-old feeling of enormous disappointment in my elected officials stirred up again like silt in a stream. Here was another tragedy that might have been prevented if we’d ever done something about the fucking guns, but is now just one more incarnation in an eternally resurrecting horror show of permissible violence.
But my feelings after the Charlie Kirk shooting were sharper, more uneasy. You might have felt the same: A suspicion bordering on certainty that the right would use this event not as an opportunity to finally do something about the fucking guns, but to gather even more kindling for political violence. And you would have been right. Today, many high-profile clowns, including the person who is inexplicably the President of the United States, are declaring war on the “radical left,” a monolith they are holding responsible for the actions of one person. Not that it matters to their shared delusion, but this is a population that owns fewer guns and is associated with fewer gun deaths than conservatives—a population that, I suspect largely because of this fact, lives in growing fear of the open-carrying, holster-thumbing, nakedly menacing antagonism of the increasingly polarized and increasingly emboldened far right.
The people in charge right now, the ones who have taken our government hostage, are going to use this event as an excuse to get even more guns, to do even more martial law, to entrench us deeper and deeper into a nation ruled by firearms, and I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind.
“What if less guns, actually” is an idea that would never even be entertained by a cabal of power hoarders who only consider something political violence if it’s being done to them. Never mind the murder of a Democratic Minnesota legislator in June; let’s not talk about January 6; siccing ICE and the National Guard on civilians isn’t violence, it’s maintaining order. To the right, I guess the Second Amendment guarantees highly selective liberties: Only the people who agree with them, who consolidate their power and uphold their warped view of reality, should bear arms. Anyone else is not a true American, is a threat, is a target.
It’s not lost on me that the absurd double standards Trump and other Republican leaders are holding up for the left are the exact same standards we have long held ourselves to. We are bringing toothless legislation to gun fights. We are railing about how the world should be while conservatives seize more and more means to reshape the world as it really is. We see ourselves as the girl in that famous photo from a 2016 Baton Rouge protest, dignified and serene in the face of pigs in riot gear. But I swear to God, it really seems like Trump sees us as the ones wearing the riot gear. I repeat: I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind.
For as long as I’ve been politically aware, hypocrisy has been the name of the game for the Republican Party. The government can’t tell you what to do, unless you’re a woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant. It’s not the government’s job to give you welfare or financial support, unless you’re a Fortune 500 company. The government shouldn’t interfere with how you raise your kids, just as long as they’re not transgender. The government shouldn’t exist at all, really, except for in the specific ways I want to use it to empower myself and other nice white families like mine and marginalize everyone else.
This systemic hypocrisy is maddening in its shamelessness and terrifying in its increasing lethality. It is offensive that we’re living in times governed by fallacy and stupidity. It is tragic that the stupidity is killing people. It is hard to see us going anywhere from here except farther down into the hell of our own making.
There’s an ancient draft in my documents titled “It’s time to arm the left.” I believe this was a kneejerk reaction to January 6. I felt (and sometimes still feel) that we were never going to reason our way out of this morass. As long as one side of the widening political divide had way more guns than the other, it seemed impossible that the unarmed side could ever achieve any of their aims. Why should I hear you out if I can just point a rifle at your chest and tell you to get the hell off my property?
I reasoned, crudely, that the left needed more equal footing in the game that the right has decided we are playing. Maybe if we were all standing around in a circle pointing guns at each other, someone would eventually decide to lower them and we could start a discussion. That was a silly argument, and even at the time, when I was seeing red and desperate to feel less powerless, I knew it was silly, which is why it will gather dust in my drafts forever.
I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have it in me. I am not the kind of person who could point a gun at another person, much less fire it. As reprehensible as many of my political opposites are, I still don’t think they deserve to die before their time. As afraid as I am of the Second Amendment cult, I don’t think the world would be better off if they got a taste of their own medicine. I still think “less guns, actually” is a far more desirable outcome than “more guns in the hands of my allies,” and I still think that’s an ideal worth holding onto. Worth fighting for, even if we don’t win in my lifetime. Even if my child’s child’s child is living in a just-slightly better version of the country I live in now. Even if just one more kid gets to grow up.
I’m Reading/Watching
The political violence that the right has just now noticed because it’s affecting their friends is self-inflicted.
Yet another reason to stop idling your car: A new study found that air pollution can contribute to certain forms of dementia.
A tough-love solution to writer’s block: “Stop lying about who you are, and write the things that are actually inside you.”
This is just a general recommendation for Taskmaster, the British comedy game show you’ve probably seen clips of on Instagram Reels. It is very funny and very good. You can watch every episode for free (with ads) on YouTube. It won’t fix the world but it may heal you a little bit.