Back in 1999, I was at work when the Columbine shooting happened. I’m not from Colorado so I didn’t know exactly where that high school was but I knew that I was only a few miles away. That’s the first time that I can remember hearing about something like that. It seemed so surprising and almost unbelievable. When people at work started mentioning that it was happening, in that moment, it was hard to wrap my mind around it. We didn’t have internet on our cell phones. I didn’t even have a cell phone then. The internet wasn’t how it is now either. The whole thing was just so strange.
Decades later, the surprise and shock is different now when we hear about the latest shooting. It’s still surprising and shocking in a way, because it makes no sense why someone would do it. What would motivate someone to do it? What could they possibly hope to accomplish or gain? But the fact that it happened at all isn’t surprising anymore.
It also continues to be surprising that we as a nation have done so little to prevent these shootings from continuing to happen. That part continues to surprise but there’s also this feeling of hopeless, sad resignation. Like so many of us know that our country is shit and that the idea of what America means, that was fed to us as children, is a lie. What America really means is selfishness and greed.
The religion that is at the foundation of the current America is Capitalism. And despite what you may be taught in an economic theory class, what happens in the real world is different. Human greed shapes the way capitalism works in the real world and the people on top always want more. It’s fucked up. Of course, it makes sense to want a lot of money so that you don’t have to worry about your basic needs EVER and also not just live comfortably but be able to live a life of luxury. But how much does any person actually need? How many cars can you drive? How many houses can you live in?
The other factor that makes us impotent to create any real change on any of the issues that are slowly killing us is the mythology that has been created about what it means to be an American. The idea of “rugged individualism”. Everyone thinks of themselves as this unique, special individual. There is a stubbornness to it. I guess that goes along with America being seen as the land of opportunity. If you work hard enough, you can succeed. That’s a very individualistic idea (and also another falsehood that we’re taught about America). No one wants to give up on what they think is right because we are all supposed to have this right to individualism.
But that doesn’t work as a collective. As a nation, we have to be able to agree or you get the shit show that we are all experiencing right now. If we never agree on anything, then nothing ever gets accomplished. Not giving up or compromising your individual belief about something plays right into that idea of what it means to be an American. To be that stubborn, rugged individual. But we all need clean water, clean air, a safe food supply, health care and on and on. Wouldn’t it make more sense to find some middle ground? To budge a little so that we can find a way that will work for most of us?
What we’re seeing is that the answer to those questions is “NO”. Americans would rather be right. Americans would rather not compromise. Americans would rather die.
This isn’t the Wild West. The gun culture in America is a nostalgic throw back to another time. How many people with a concealed carry permit think they’re going to draw on one of these psycho shooters and save the day? I’m not an expert on the Old West, but I’m pretty sure that it didn’t happen like that too often. Usually, the regular folk got killed or taken advantage of just like is happening now in all these mass, public shootings.
If you disagree with everything I’ve written so far but have managed to keep reading…I’m not anti-gun. I grew up in a house with guns. I used to hang out in a neighbor’s garage and shoot a pellet gun at targets (The people who are into guns are mocking me about mentioning a pellet gun but you know that any true anti-gun person thinks pellet guns are evil too). I learned how to shoot a rifle at Boy Scout camp. I watched my grandfather shoot rats in our back yard through the open kitchen window. I remember begging him to give me a chance to shoot a rat. The rifle we used in Boy Scouts only had sights and I was pretty good. My grandfather’s rifle had a scope. I was sure I wouldn’t miss.
Here’s a couple questions: When you go to the grocery store do you think you should be in fear of getting shot? When you send your child to school do you think you should be in fear of your child getting shot?
It just doesn’t seem like public safety should be so hard to agree on. We should be able to figure out a way to make it harder to get randomly shot in public. The people out there who like having guns probably don’t want to randomly get shot in public either, right? So how do we continue to not sort this out?
Let’s compare it to health care. We all need health care. We all not only need access to health care, we need access to affordable health care. But insurance companies are often for-profit businesses who are publicly traded on the stock market. That means their primary goal is not creating an efficient system to allow their subscribers access to affordable health care. Their primary goal is to make a profit and keep share holders happy. Sorry, but those goals are incompatible.
The reasons we can’t agree on health care are the same reasons that we can’t agree on how to slow down gun violence. People believe in the myths about America, that I mentioned above, and what that means to be an American. And the greedy, immoral, selfish pieces of shit who are running the show know this. They are playing us. Too many Americans believe in the mythos to the detriment of their own improvement. They’re fed this bullshit about how capitalism is good for them and if they have a different type of health care system that focused on health care instead of profit it would undermine their individual chance of getting ahead through hard work. The same kind of bullshit that makes people believe that if we made it illegal to buy a machine gun it would someone diminish what it means to be an American, that their whole fucking existence would change just because every asshole couldn’t own a machine gun. How much would not owning a machine gun really change your day to day life?
I have no idea how to separate the belief in this American mythology from the facts of how our country is actually operating. How can we get people to see that these myths and American ideals are being used to keep them in their place? This is what Marx meant with the line, “religion is the opium of the people”. These myths about what it means to be an American and what capitalism means are the current opium of the American people. (Here’s a crushingly sad but relevant aside: How often do you hear about the “opioid crisis”? Americans aren’t just using religion and American mythology as an opiate to pacify their fears and anxieties. Americans are using real opiates to escape from the despair of what life in American has become for so many.) If we can’t untangle the facts from the myths we have no hope of creating change.