Another day, another massacre in America. Ho hum. Is this what we have to keep reading about in newspapers and seeing on television nowadays? Is this the new normal? Is this what we’ve come down to under Donald Trump and his revolution of chaos and polarization?
This is essentially where we are at this point in our already contentious history. With these maddingly-avoidable atrocities, 21st century Americans are exhibiting signs of an oppressive comprehension of a tribalistic, fractious, social media-dominated climate. It is probable too that this climate’s devaluation of propriety and judgment has given a gun-toting minority a distinct political advantage in the corridors of power in Washington D.C.
America, once in its humanistic heyday a navigable structure of social and cultural engineering, is morally and physically gutting it out through an environment of rising turmoil. No longer are our precious values or collective democratic identity as Americans being seamlessly passed down to the younger generation. Indeed, it seems there isn’t much room for those shared values and identity anymore.These days, many of the Baby Boomers and the Generation Xers are more likely to make a case to their Millennial heirs that life in America is steadily becoming, to borrow from Hobbes, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
That mortifying reality is increasingly being laid bare what now with the latest American bloodbath in of all places, a Florida high school. High schools, which have always been so much of an indispensable part of our social fabric, were for the most part respected venues of learning and neutral grounds when politics somehow intruded at that level of education. High schools are likewise the last step before the challenge of college studies and expectations and the impressionable self-realization of young adulthood begin to encroach on teenagers’ lives.
But sometimes we have been guilty of taking high schools for granted even as they have been the institutions that have guided and educated teenagers during their vital transition from adolescence into their coming-of-age phase. The substance of this submission has trapped many high schools and their students in a twilight zone between protection and vulnerability.
That a more pervasive sense of precaution and insecurity has been marked in high schools all across America---not just in high schools but in younger grade schools as well---as a result of mass shootings going back over the last twenty years, is affirmation that the social landscape we live in is under an inordinate amount of duress. Perhaps as much as any other time in America’s social history.
It is no longer safe to assume that schools at all levels---along with churches, movie theaters, music concerts, and other common sites of social interaction or recreation---are entirely immune from the worst conflations of mental illness and appalling sociopathy. It’s every bit a travesty of civilization that so many Americans are at risk from the violent pathologies of an alienated few. Yet here we are, well into the Information Age, mired in a world in which millions of our countrymen and women are resisting the evolutionary pull of reason and rationality, so much so that truth and knowledge have been rendered provisional.
The powerful depth of feelings and emotions that these massacres summon up is needless to say, completely understandable. Inseparable from these acts of horror are the subsequent waves of grief and sorrow. What tends to follow the emotional devastation is a desperate search for consolation, consolation that will in time bring about a restorative forgetting which is, according to the novelist Milan Kundera, both “absolute injustice and absolute solace at the same time.”
Anyone would want to forget a painful past. But while there would be solace in this forgetting as Kundera said, there would also be an injustice to go along with it. The injustice lies in the forgetting for to do so may bring relief but it will also reveal an inability to cope with the past and thus with the future. It is said that we should never live in the past, but at the same time we should never forget it. It was after all, Walter Benjamin who said “Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” From a philosophical point of view, one can take from Benjamin’s quote that the past will help determine the future.
In the case of mass murder shootings in America, remembering the troubled past in a constructive light will have salutary effects. Americans do not need more dime-a-dozen expressions of sorrow and compassion by their apathetic, self-serving representatives in Washington. Nor do they need more candlelight gatherings that are studded with flowers and prayers and condolence cards and useless tears which only get them to feel sorry for themselves. That’s the futility of forgetting. Wanting the pain of the mass murders to go away by erasing the memory of it sets the stage for the next American slaughter.
The horror and torment of the gun-related heinousness that has afflicted America in the post-Cold War era must always be remembered no matter how difficult that may be. The only way positive change will happen is if people get mad, not sad. The lines and contours and justifications of the gun control argument are clearly drawn for everyone to see. Gun control proponents must not waver or get sidetracked as they publicly act to ensure their children’s safety.
ALLEN GABORRO
Comments
Post a Comment