The latest shooting is over. Very soon it will fade like invisible ink, further hardening our collective consciousness against a despicable form of violence against innocence.
By now, unless the shooting is personal, we Americans know the drill quite well. Our president will stand up and talk about the need for a change in gun policy. The president of the NRA will get up and talk about the 2nd ammendment, and mental health. The press and internet will explode with arguments and stats, and mentions of Australia and Honduras. The left and right will talk loudly, with lots of inflammatory language, but neither side will do much listening. There will be news clips about the victims, the shooter, his mental health (it’s almost always a male), and his family (in this case his mother was a gun rights advocate who kept a loaded AR 15 and AK 47 in her house. There’ll be stirring pictures of the memorial service, and a nod to some heroic figure who put themselves in harm’s way.
Then, after a week, everyone will get back to living their lives as if nothing happened. Then it will happen again. And again. And again. This one appears like it will be #298 on the list once it’s updated; more than one a day, in the most civilized nation in the world.
All this is tragedy enough. But the bigger tragedy, in my opinion, is the peace we’ve made with this ongoing scar and tragedy, so visible to the rest of the world, and yet becoming an increasingly evident blind spot in our collective national consciousness. We seem to “get over it” in short order, so that this will become just one more thing to which we adapt. Like late term abortion, food policies that are killing both people and the land, childhood obesity, and homelessness, human trafficking, and mass shootings are quickly becoming the new normal.
According Walter Brueggeman, the prophetic role during the time of the Old Testament was to awaken hope for something different. This was important than, as now, because dysfunction had become the new normal. Without such hope, we accept our new normal, and then we retreat into tiny survivalist mentalities whereby our personal safety, long life, and well being become paramount. Of course we all know what Jesus had to say about that kind of mind set right?
I don’t have solutions. I know the challenge of putting the genie back in the bottle, even if our country wanted things to change. I understand a belief in self defense and defense of family. I understand the rhetoric for both sides, and have been around this discussion long enough now to know that there’s no simple way forward. The right and left and mostly preaching to echo chambers. But most of all, I understand that the violence is systemic, and the status quo isn’t changing a thing.
For the love of God (and I choose the words, not as a saying, but intentionally because they mean something) I have a suggestion: Can we please pray that the trend line of becoming numb to this kind of violence ends, and that we’re shaken awake to the tragedy this is? I say this because mourning is the soil out from which a vision for change will someday occur.
There’s much that’s right with our nation, and against the backdrop of Syria, Nigeria, Ukraine, and dozens of other locales, our challenge pales. Still, this is our challenge, and it’s important that, as was prayed decades ago by the founder of World Vision, that “our hearts be broken by the things that break the heart of God”
Can we at least start there?
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