Another Mass Shooting

The country is broken, and it isn’t Donald Trump’s fault. He is what we have vomited up—a symptom of something more sinister, something that has corrupted the soul of the nation.

Another mass shooting happened this weekend. This one was on the campus of Brown University, an Ivy league school in Providence, Rhode Island. The details are still a bit murky, but two people are dead, and several are seriously injured. A “person of interest” was detained and released. The community is in shock and grieving.

It’s finals week. Students are stressed and worried. They have this look about them at this time of year. Eyes wild with the absence of sleep. Hair undisciplined. Clothes unattended to. They are exhausted with study, and the world around them comes in as a blur. Some are close to their breaking point. The pressure is that intense. Passing exams, writing papers, and getting to winter break – getting home – is all that matters.

And then this happens, a day before the anniversary of the slaughter of twenty children at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

I don’t know what motivated the shooter. Revenge, hatred, madness? But what I do know is that we live in a country where too many people on too many occasions believe that their only recourse to resolve whatever it is that has hurt them rests with the gun. Words fail. Rage overwhelms. We are left with the sharp crack and thud of gunshots. People end up having to bury their dead.

This mass shooting, like the others and like the one that happened thirteen years ago, will generate the traditional political theater. People will send the Brown community their prayers. They will decry the shooter as a disgruntled soul or madman. Others will call for gun control. Still others will go out and buy more AR-15s because they fear others will take their guns away from them (the gun industry will run ads saying as much). The back and forth works like a ritual—a repetition aimed at disciplining the body and the heart, in this case, to move on, to care about the dead on the surface, and to wait for the next mass shooting to do the same thing. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

But through it all, beyond the rites, Americans will not talk extensively about what is wrong with the country and what lies beneath the ugliness of our politics and our days. There may be a gesture to do so here or there. But some other bit of news, like the Epstein files or the issue of affordability or some monstrous act by ICE, will come along and grab hold of our attention. Moving us like cats chasing light.

An American inheritance. Here we avoid confronting the pervasive sense of loneliness and hopelessness—the feelings of isolation and alienation that characterize so much of the American way of life. That sense of being unloved, that grim reality of placing things above people that has exhausted the soil of this place and left patches of American life barren. People like JD Vance and Stephen Miller will say that all of this reflects a lack of social cohesion and this is a direct result of immigration policy. We don’t know who we are as Americans anymore, they say.

But that is tricky magic—a sleight of hand that keeps our eyes on the shining ball. Americans don’t want to admit of the emptiness that engulfs this place and of our “striking addiction to irreality.” That the ongoing demand to make money, to buy things that make us feel good, the algorithms and politicians that keep us enraged, and the demand by markets and images that we live transactional lives on the surface of things has left many of us afraid and terribly alone.

We will do anything to avoid dealing with the calamity of the self that results from it all. Hide in our work. Retreat into fantasy to escape the real world and the human beings in it. Find safety in religious dogma that settles our doubts and confirms our prejudices. Take refuge in the mob to avoid dealing with the one thing we can’t seem to escape: ourselves.

Anything, or just one thing, can cause someone to snap. And then the rhythmic sounds of the gun. Crack. Buzz. Thud.

We have no national mechanisms to contain or redirect it all. No sense of collective well-being or idea of mutual obligation or sense of national purpose (beyond generalized hatred) tied to a robust idea of the good that might add some measure of meaning to a life lived with others. We have privatized suffering in this country. And grief is yours and yours alone. You are on your own.

No wonder when it all comes crashing down people snap, reach for the gun, and pull the trigger. So much is broken here on the inside and the outside. It is not simply our politics or the economy. The brokenness is in many of us, as if the moral moorings have come unloose. And until Americans admit that—and see that Donald Trump is not the cause, but the consequence—then maybe we might be able to do more than simply send our prayers for the dead at Brown and for the victims waiting for next time.

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