We Shrug Our Shoulders and Move On

It is a rare rainy day in the foothills of the Rockies. The clouds are at about 5600 feet, just a few hundred feet above the surface of the earth. I awoke to golden leaves gracing the outer branches of the cottonwoods along the St. Vrain. The river flowed yesterday. It flows today. It will flow again tomorrow, after the clouds have lifted and the sun has returned. But something will be different.

There are malevolent forces in our midst. We saw them at Sandy Hook, and again at Pulse. Sunday night we saw them in Las Vegas. Over the last 20 years more than half of the mass killings in the world have occurred in the United States.

We act as though we are powerless against these forces, but the truth is we have decided to be powerless. We have decided to gasp at the bulletin, offer prayers over the headlines, then shrug our shoulders and move on. That’s not okay.

Don’t spin anything. Don’t even start with the rhetoric. If assault rifles were banned, the Sunday night massacre would not have happened. It is that simple.

There are 250 million adults in the United States, and only five million members of the NRA, the combined population of Brooklyn and Queens. No one at the NRA believes they are powerless. So why do the other 245 million of us believe we are powerless? Because most of the other 245 million Americans are not politically engaged, that’s why. And when you are not politically engaged, you are powerless.

Why can’t a new pro-life (in favor of severely restricting assault rifles) lobby emerge? Can’t the rest of America agree on this one issue? Apparently the answer to that question is a sorry no. Some of us are too comfortable. Some of us assume the odds are low that our family will be shot, and that’s enough for our self-centered selves. I’m afraid the bottom line is that those who fight so hard for the right to own assault weapons are more frightened than the rest of us.

They are frightened of our federal government. They are frightened of Blacks, immigrants, Hispanics, LGBTQ individuals and pretty much everyone who does not look like them. Frightened people who are already in power are very dangerous.

If the election of Barack Obama showed we live in a nation in which a highly competent Black man can be elected president, they decided to show us they still had enough votes to elect a highly incompetent white man as president.

They also want us to know they still hold enough power to make sure a crazy white man can get an assault rifle and kill innocent people. They would rather accept that reality than lose their political clout.

ISIS tried to claim credit for the Vegas shooting. We don’t need ISIS to bring us down. The fear of angry white men and the families they control is enough to bring us down. Creating threats that do not exist is their stock in trade. It keeps their base frightened and loyal. They know we are not afraid enough to truly unite to end their reign. So we will mourn for a few days, complain for few more, and Vegas will happen again.  I do not mean to sound callous.  I am just reporting an undeniable trend.

Here is what bothers me the most. Many of the frightened Americans who continue to allow these assault rifles to be painfully easy to acquire, as well as those who continue to deny civil rights to people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants and refugees, are members of the fundamentalist and evangelical churches of which I was once a part. God forgive me for not speaking more strongly against their unjustified fears when I had the platform to do so.

And so it tragically goes.