While I was in England last October -- a long story better explained in a previous posting -- one of the unbelievably kind people I was fortunate to meet was, besides a great chili cook and a speed demon runner, an English policeman. As I suspect is how most English-American conversations go down, we eventually got around to comparing-contrasting details of our daily lives. As he talked about his job as a policeman, there was no talk of Kevlar vests or shooting range training that comes up a lot when talking to American cops.
"You don't carry a gun?" I eventually had to ask him.
"Why would I carry a gun?" he responded, genuinely meaning it. "Your voice is always the best first line of defense against the bad guys"
It's a writing cliché, but I was literally stunned silent by this. I just stared at the guy for a few seconds.
"But what if the bad guys have a gun?" I asked eventually.
Now it was his turn to look confused.
"Erm... they don't."
I've perhaps never been more painfully aware of my American upbringing and identity than I was during that conversation, and I think that's disgusting. Even with all the blatantly touristy things I saw and did over in another country, nothing marked me as an outsider as much as my inability to grasp the concept that guns were just not a reality of everyday life in that part of the world. I literally couldn't comprehend that world view, and I've never looked at ours the same way again afterwards.
I'm not ashamed to be a proud U.S. citizen, and hope never to be anything otherwise until the day I die. I'm thankful every single day for our basic constitutional rights, not least of which because they allow me the freedom of speech to maintain this silly blog here and tell you stories about the ridiculous things I get up to sometimes (and which similarly allows you to read -- or not read -- it of your own free will).
A lot of people have been exercising their own freedom of speech over the last few days to try and make sense of or express their grief for the monstrous attack in Orlando, FL. Social media is just a stream now of people sharing talk show hosts or screencap'd tweets articulating those thoughts for us in a very public way. I'm usually of the mind that such talk is better left to people who actually have business talking about it -- "give every man thy ear, but few thy voice" is usually my go-to for not contributing to the overwhelming wall of white noise that often marks the aftermath of these kinds of national tragedies.
After all, what perspective do I have to offer that makes my opinion worth a damn here? I like to think of myself as a LGBTQ ally, but I myself am not gay (and furthermore, I'm not a PoC in either of those communities, a fact which I feel has been unfortunately overlooked in a lot of this); I've been to Orlando several times on family vacations, but I can't say I'm too familiar with the town outside the boundaries of Disneyworld; hell, I can't even say I've ever been a regular on the club scene. Those are the kinds of voices that should obviously speak loudest here, not a societally-privileged adventure chronicler with a Pixar-themed blog site. But even though I'm not a LGBTQ clubbing Floridian...
I'm an American citizen.
And today, that makes me just as susceptible to an attack like anyone else.
I'm having a hard time right now believing I live in a country where that ugly, ugly "fact of life" is par for the course, so today I need to take a break from the stuff I usually post and get my thoughts down here instead.
In my year in the world of teaching now, I've had to make peace with the possibility of an armed threat on any given school day; of the reality, in a day of reading stories to kindergarteners or 3rd graders, that there have to be contingencies for mass shootings. "How am I gonna save the kids today if a psychopath gets into the school?" is a real, actual thought I have actually had go through my brain.
For the last few years, every trip to the movies for me has begun with a general environment sweep to find the closest means of exit in case of an emergency, and every person who gets up out of his or her seat during the course of the movie makes me inadvertently tense up, when in fact they're just going to the bathroom.
This is my script now. This is the script of 21st century American society. And I'm horrified by it.
Even the counterarguments are scripted now. One that I'm frankly sick and tired of hearing is that, "guns don't kill, people do," or, better, "the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." To me, both are maddeningly reactive measures, steps to be taken once an incident has happened/is happening which will, hopefully, put a stop to it. To me, it's as if the general attitude is like, "Chemotherapy is the only thing we can do against cancer." Chemotherapy is undoubtedly one of the greatest medical advances in history, and it's the reason several friends and loved ones are still with me today. But having had to witness loved ones and friends alike go through their unbreakable experiences, I can attest even secondhand to the fact that it is a devastatingly RAVAGING treatment which, absurdly, often makes the original problem seem small in comparison. Chemotherapy saves lives, yes, but other parts of the body are destroyed in the meantime. Not for one minute has the scientific community ever gone, "Yep, job well done, we've done as much as we can, this is all we have to work with now," and washed their already-scrubbed hands clean. Not for one minute. Isn't it far, far better instead to ask:
What if we could just cure cancer in the first place?
What if we didn't have to worry about chemo, because there was no cancer necessitating its use?
We haven't solved that problem yet, but dammit if it's not the Holy Grail of modern medical research. We as a country raise BILLIONS of dollars every year in fun runs and walkathons and buzzcuts to fund research towards that end. It's a PROACTIVE strategy that recognizes, yes, there's a problem at hand, yet is optimistic enough to dare and say "Let's not accept this as the status quo. We can do better. We will do better."
So what the hell's the difference?
In my opinion, gun violence has become a cancer on a national scale. Terrorist or mental illness or homophobe or just general garbage, it doesn't matter -- nothing about any of those motivations makes a person dangerous to others so much as putting a rapid fire assault rifle in their hands, an occurrence which borders on unbelievability in its ease and frequency. It's become essentially as convenient now to buy a kitted-out assault rifle (I maintain that it's literally impossible for something to wear its statement of intent as conspicuously as "ASSAULT rifle") and a Call of Duty sized bag of ammo than it is to buy an advance ticket for the movies ... and like I've said, those purchases are becoming more and more likely to come into contact. It's laughable, except for the fact I've probably never been more scared by anything.
Sure, your second amendment rights that allow you to carry a gun are no less valid than my first amendment rights that allow me to say all this. I just maintain the fact that the second amendment was written at a time when our defense against an invading redcoat force consisted of "Hey Sam, grab your musket and meet us down on the common at 9am if it's not too big a problem," and you were lethal with said musket if you could fire off more than a round a minute. I truly wish there was a way (outside a Lin-Manuel Miranda musical) that the founding fathers could somehow lend their opinions to the actual debate that somehow still persists today of "does a military-grade AR-15 automatic rifle still fall under the umbrella of it's just for self-defense?" when that same weapon has been singly responsible for five high profile mass-casualty shootings in as many years (not to be confused with the other 133 U.S. mass shootings that have taken place just within the 165 days of 2016 thus far).
Those more world-weary or experienced than I have all the right in the world to sneer at me now, and maybe this is your evidence that I should just have kept my mouth shut about things I have no business talking about. Maybe guns are just too ingrained in our culture, and too many people adhere to an absolutist extremism, that we'll just treat the Orlando tragedy like every single one that's come before it... send "thoughts and prayers" to families torn apart beyond the help of either, observe obligatory moments of silence, and vaguely vow to do better the next time. In other words, nothing. Because as I've just said, without a change of any sort, the implication is that there is going to be a next time, for certain, unchangeable, unavoidable, scripted.
I'm a writer. I use words, blog posts like this, as a sort of self-helping cleanse to organize my thoughts about complicated issues like this (and if other eyes but mine get to read it, hey, I count it as a bonus). As a writer, when I see a script with problems, I put on my editing hat and get to work revising it. I don't know or even care what it is, but we, together, need to revise this script, cure this cancer, before it does any more irreparable damage. I'm rarely outspoken, angry, like this in any kind of public form, but I'm sick and tired -- hell, I'll even admit I'm jealous -- of seeing other countries with other scripts that have already been cured, looking at us, seeing ours, and asking "what are you waiting for?" Because at this point, I'm just not sure what the answer to that question is.
