About death and life.
Out of yesterday’s gun death news, from Minneapolis, one detail sticks in my mind: older kids lying on top of younger ones to shield and shelter them. A moment of both bravery and loving care, a reminder of the good that people are capable of, in the face of immense evil — the evil, not of the shooter, who was dreadfully deranged (and apparently crammed with conspiratorial fantasies), but of the machine of death constructed over decades by political leaders in collaboration with gun manufacturers and the NRA. So that for times so numerous that they blend together into one bloody tapestry of slaughtered children, college students, churchgoers, shoppers, and party-goers, we cry out in agony (as the mayor of Minneapolis did yesterday) NEVER AGAIN, while those mechanics of death offer only pious thoughts and prayers against an event they triggered themselves but fervently disavow, telling us that no one could have predicted this, it’s a mental health problem, and the only protection would be to arm teachers, professors, leaders of religious congregations, grocery store clerks, and doormen at dance clubs — it takes a gun to stop a gun — and to lock up every place where people gather (so that guardians can protect them from those unpredictable crazies).
Meanwhile, ONLY IN AMERICA are so many so bloodily deranged.
Their stance is thoroughly disingenuous, consciously evil. But they are the people with serious money and political power, entirely capable of putting down the resistance of millions. So that what we face is FOREVER AGAIN, fresh slaughters every few months or so, as we’ve become inured to.
It is possible for endless patient resistance on a large scale to counter this evil, but that can take a century or more; consider civil rights for Black people in my country, finally more or less achieved in about a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation (but now being undone by rich and powerful white people), while the larger program of true racial equality is still a dream in Martin Luther King Jr.’s eye, requiring maybe another century. The alternative is a genuine bloody revolution, whose consequences are notoriously unpredictable and often unpleasant.
But I fear that we’re on the Gun Death Train, with lots of stops, on a line whose final destination is constantly receding and might well never be within reach. What we’ve got for solace along the way is small acts of bravery and loving care. We need more of them, many more of them, and we need to act in concert whenever we can, to do these things together, because we are stronger together and it’s going to be a long hard road, one none of us will see the end of, so we’ll need that strength to get from day to day.
Meanwhile, keep your power dry.
August 28, 2025 at 3:27 pm |
In case you were startled by the vehemence of my attack on the mechanics of death — which moved me to slam them in a sentence of 115 or so words about my responses to their fostering the shooting of schoolchildren: grief and anger, as my title says — I will remind you, as I do on this blog every so often, that (from my 3/3/25 posting “Warnings”):
https://arnoldzwicky.org/2025/03/03/warnings/
August 28, 2025 at 10:04 pm |
wonderful writing; may the message reach some new ears.
August 29, 2025 at 5:43 am |
Thank you; I hope so. As for the writing, that took hours, of revisions ranging from the minute to the global, with a lot of weeping, but stoked by rage that had to be crafted to present itself as an passionate outpouring of spontaneous feeling, complete with an urgent comma splice. So it pleases me to have it my craft recognized and appreciated; I’ve been working on it for almost 75 years now, but here it’s crucial that I not come off like a splenetic geezer.