There’s no avoiding the subject of last Friday’s horrible massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, as much as one might wish it.
All through Friday and Saturday our usual news sources were overflowing with reports about the shootings, and even when we took refuge in an old folks’ radio station the pop standards of Peggy Lee and Frank Sinatra were frequently interrupted with further updates on the carnage. Local stations “localized” the shootings, all reluctantly admitting that it could happen here, and everywhere people were talking about how terrible it was. At the very traditional church where we worship a tough old veteran of the Vietnam War was choking back tears on Sunday as he led a prayer asking that the victims’ families be comforted, and during the after-service chit-chat we saw one of the congregation’s sagest biblical scholars offering him a gentle pat on the back while admitting that there’s really nothing to say.
What is there is to say, except to offer a prayer that the victims’ families be comforted? Nothing we can think of, and no one else seems to have come up with anything new since the last mass murder, but because there’s no avoiding the subject everyone apparently feels obliged to trot out all the usual responses. So far we have not encountered any attempt to link the perpetrator to the Tea Party or any other conservative political causes, which has lately become a press rite in the wake of a mass shooting, but otherwise all the obligatory clichés have been deployed.
The inevitable cries for draconian gun control laws immediately followed, and from all the predictable people and organizations. This obliges the people who value a right to self-defense to make their case, even though they’d prefer to wait until a more dispassionate discussion is possible, and thus all the old familiar arguments get shouted once again.
All the old familiar arguments about America’s mental health system are also being shouted, as always. At the Gawker.com web site a mother offered her jarringly frank account of living with a son who suffers a madness frighteningly similar to that of the Connecticut shooter, a thoughtful reminder of the complex dilemmas involved in the issue, but otherwise the criticisms do not seem constructive.
The comments section beneath the mother’s essay are full of typical internet vitriol, much of it explicitly expressing an anti-white prejudice, most of it a strictly personal animus against a mother who seems to be struggling to do her best in a difficult situation. This also seems to be part of the new post-mass-shooting tradition, along with the ghoulish behavior of the news media, the demands to turn schools into fortresses, the occasional allusions to the murders that go largely unremarked, and the scapegoating of the parents and the schools and the police.
Of course, there are also the routine calls for national soul-searching. It is never made clear, though, what the nation should be searching for in its collective soul. As much as Americans like to regard themselves as exceptional in every way, mass murder is by no means an exclusively American phenomenon. Traditionalists who blame some aspect of contemporary society should also note the mass murder is not unique to modern times. Individuals have succumbed to the madness in every society in every age, and like all evil it has always proved impossible to eradicate.
The president, who famously promised to end the rise of the oceans and health the planet, seems willing to get the perfection of human nature a shot as well. Speaking to an audience in the town where the shootings occurred, the president asked “Are we prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage? That the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that violence visited on our children year after year is the price of our freedom?” Some reporters took this to mean that the president intends to pursue stricter gun laws, which seems a fair conclusion, but the hubris of the implied answers to these rhetorical questions is even more worrisome. Sometimes a nation must admit that it is powerless against the vicissitudes of life. If the politics are too hard, it is because people are naturally protective of their rights. The price of freedom can be dear, but it will never purchase the safety and security that is promised by those who will take it away.
These things need to be said, even at time of national mourning.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 