Wishing for peace

Most of the time my posts are light, happy reading, with a little reflection mixed in. At least that's how I intend them to be. But sometimes we have to get a little more serious and after Friday's school shooting in Connecticut, now is the right time for that.

Living outside of the U.S. makes me wonder more why these things happen in our country. There are plenty of unstable, even violent people in the rest of the world, but they don't become mass murderers. What is it about our culture that makes these things happen?

It's awful that people died needlessly on Friday. But civilians also die needlessly in countries that are at war, and kids die in homocides in American cities all the time. Why is there no public outcry for them? Maybe it's because places we believed to be the most peaceful are shattered by violence.
In a time of year when we sing about peace on earth, peace was shattered at Sandy Hook school, as it has been in places with equally idyllic names like Columbine, Aurora, and Red Lake.

So today I am featuring an essay by my much respected and even more adored guest blogger Brian McCarthy. He says it all better than I can.
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The tragedy in Connecticut has America reeling. It has me reeling. The question is, for how long? After all of the commentators, politicians, and Facebookers are done sending out their hugs, thoughts, and prayers, what will happen? My guess is that things, as they do in our fast-paced, digitized world,
will go back to a normalcy of sorts. Perhaps more tragic than this one event is that events like this have become normal to occur ever few years in the United States, for ours is a culture that glorifies violence, war, and guns.

I don’t know who will ever read this, but I know for some casting an aspersion like that about America might make some recoil in patriotic disbelief. Having spent an increasing amount of time living, and working among non-Americans over the last few years, what I have just said will come as no surprise to them. The only thing they seem to be unable to comprehend is why so many of my
countrymen can’t comprehend that this endemic violence in America is a problem and that it would be in our best interest to change.

Of course America is also a land of blame. Oh sure, we bask in the mythology of the concept of growing up in a country that celebrates individuality and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, but a deeper reflection on that narrative will prove that to be somewhat inaccurate for most of the 310-plus million American citizens. So, who to blame over this violent culture of ours?

Certainly our politicians can take a part of it, and blaming them does make us feel good. The narrative about gridlock in Washington, and politicians being out of touch is also one that fills our 24-hour, bite-sized, dumbed down news cycle, and it is perpetuated by politicians on both sides of the aisle to our disdain, or ourdelight (depending upon who is in front of the camera, and what channel they are on). If we narrow down the discussion simply to our obsession with guns (never mind the desire to expand the American Empire by military means under the guise of spreading freedom and democracy), then there is enough blame for all of them to share. Some of our elected officials take the stance of publicly supporting our violent culture, by standing by gun lobby groups, and espousing
the greatness of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution (never mind that the rationale for the 2nd Amendment and what gun lovers currently use the 2nd Amendment for are fairly well removed from one another). The other group of politicians, choose to say nothing about guns, fearful that taking a stand against guns would be seen as unpatriotic, or make them look less courageous then their gun-defending counterparts, ultimately losing their places in power.

What about the rest of us, though? Our love of violence is celebrated in so many parts of our American society. The National Football League, our favorite weekend diversion during the fall and winter, begins many of its telecasts with triumphalist music that evokes feelings of an army marching off to war. Militarized robots posture during commercial breaks while the music plays, never mind the connotation that the game itself has (see George Carlin’s baseball vs. football comedy sketch). The NFL starts its season each year with warplanes flying over individual stadiums, to continue our obsessive militarism. I cannot understand how it could be just innocent fun, linking these destructive machines that are designed to kill to what used to be just a game. Yet like the Romans of old, the mob loves a violent spectacle to forget about their own reality, and they get it each Sunday.

What of our love of violence in some of our other favorite distractions? Film, television, video games, and music all have strong, popular elements that allow us to gawk and revel in the demise and death of people on a regular basis. Americans generally have a love of the free market—after all we love freedom—and yet parents want to blame the media and society for these products. Yet if
demand were removed for these products, then supply would wither.

Perhaps it also comes from a crisis of masculinity. Americans associate with what it takes to be a man as being strong. And for us, strength that we most value is of a physical nature. We see our heroes as strong men, who often are holding guns. Indeed some of the people commenting on the Connecticut tragedy have lamented the fact that there wasn’t one strong “good Samaritan with a gun” to march in to that school like Gary Cooper, or John Wayne and solve the problem that community was powerless to stop.

What we as Americans don’t see as strength are the virtues of strong men like Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, or Jesus Christ. Certainly we all agree that they did good things during their time on Earth, and those lessons are good to teach in elementary school. Yet when faced with a true personal crisis, do Americans teach their children to face it as they would have?

I don’t have any answers. Just questions, really. Those that know me have seen my passion when coaching the violent game of football, and know my love of a film that centers on an outlaw hero that comes to rescue the town. I grew up in a culture where I learned to be an individual, to be powerful, to avoid appearing weak, and thus to always be “strong.” I have been homophobic, and racist at
times in my life to avoid appearing weak in front of others. When I was young, I wanted to join the military and I have also wanted to work as a policeman, before finding my calling as a teacher. In recent years I have also strongly considered purchasing a gun.

For those that know me well, however, and those people are few and far between, these thoughts probably won’t come as a surprise. I am trying to find my way as an American in a much larger world. What I am learning is that business as usual for America, a land that I do confess to loving, cannot be an option. We need people of all walks of life in our country to find a true strength, and a true courage that cannot be replicated by holding a firearm or imposing one’s physical will on another. The children and teachers that died in this tragedy need to be memorialized not by speeches, but by action. My thoughts and prayers are not with them, primarily, but with us. I pray that we,
as Americans, have the courage to speak up and out against this violence, and all of the violence that is so pervasive in our culture, and work toward building a culture and a society that allows us to love and care for one another, above all other things.