“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”
-James Baldwin
We are not ok. A fourteen-year-old in Winder, Georgia killed two of his classmates and two teachers with an AR-15 style weapon. The authorities charged him as an adult with four counts of felony murder. They also charged his father with second degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, and cruelty to children, because he knowingly allowed his son to have the gun.
I woke up on Sunday morning to a mass shooting near I-75 in a rural area of Laurel County, Kentucky. Nine vehicles had been shot into while traveling north and south on the interstate. Five people remain in stable condition. Reading the story, I found that something similar happened on September 4th along Interstate 5 in the Seattle and Tacoma areas. Six people were injured while driving on the highway. Can you imagine? You’re driving home or to visit a friend and suddenly, on a highway, you realize that you have been shot.
We are not ok. I don’t mean this in some political way: that easy access to guns in this country makes these sorts of incidents more likely; that the gun lobby and the states that benefit from gun manufacturers have us all by the throat; or that politicians are feckless and cynical. We know this. We should have tired of the political theater that comes with mass shootings a long time ago.
Instead, Americans have settled into their roles as spectators of calamity.
The idea of charging this fourteen-year-old as an adult – even as I recognize the horror of what he has done – reveals the moral rot at the heart of the country. The authorities would have us believe that only he and his family are responsible. It is a crude and crass abdication of our responsibility for this baby – for all our babies. We cast him aside (like we do so many of our children here, in Gaza, and all over the globe) and wash our sins away.
Something has broken in us. It is not just our politics. What ails this nation is in the marrow of the bone. Sympathy withers. Selfishness expands. Moral concerns narrow, and our hatreds deepen. What rests in the bosom of this country when we can sit back and watch all this death—especially of children—and do nothing?
Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others helps me understand a bit of what’s happening. “Photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. A call for peace. A cry for revenge. Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.”
Bemused awareness? Damn. A nice way of describing the corruption of the soul.
So much has happened over these last years. The ugliness of our politics swallows up everything. It feels as if we’ve been left out in the open like an exposed nerve ending. Red, swollen, and inflamed.
The fact of the matter is that Americans have yet to come to terms with the immediacy of death that overwhelmed us just a few years ago. That death came like a tidal wave, but the death of our babies has been more like a steady stream. And each time we turn away from it all – each time we act as if nothing has happened or assume that this is “the reality we live in,” something inside of this country splits and splinters like a rotten support beam that can no longer bear the weight.
We need to do some soul-tending and ask hard questions. What are we so afraid of that we would arm ourselves to the teeth? Why are we hell-bent on violence as the answer to our troubles? And why do we so desperately need enemies to feel secure in who we are? James Baldwin was right. “Children have never been any good at listening to their elders but have never failed to imitate them.”
In the end, charging this troubled child as an adult won’t settle anything. It certainly will not prevent another school shooting. The decision reflects a warped and distorted view of justice and the absence of love. We need to hold ourselves accountable and responsible. To do that, we will have to admit that WE ARE NOT OK.
I was dismayed when they immediately said they were going to charge him as an adult. What have we come to. He is a child, a disturbed child, but nevertheless a child. Not saying that he shouldn't receive punishment, but this to me is cruel and inhumane.
Why have we let men decide they need an AR to hunt a deer to be used for dinner. Are men so afraid of being seen as weak they need guns of war to protect them. Do we need to throw children in with hardened criminals, are men so weak. Are men so foolish to believe that the gun you own shows how tough you are. It sickens me.
I ran across this substack for the first time today and really appreciated Begin Again in particular.
You are entirely correct. We seem to be bleeding out our soul one death and indignity at a time.
I used to somewhat blithely assume the arc of the universe was bending towards justice. Now I guess I appreciate the constancy of effort and will from so many are required to see it so.
I often find myself pretty far to the right of some of your political positions, but I always really appreciate your moral clarity and how your values are the starting and ending place of pretty much everything you say. Thank you for your wisdom.