“Just a complete tragedy.” Those were the words Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Texas Department of Public Safety used to describe Tuesday’s heart-wrenching loss of 19 children and two teachers to a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. At such a fraught time, better words are scarce, but I think Olivarez’s description misses an adjective crucial for characterizing America’s exceptional strain of tragedy: avoidable.
Olivarez is not alone in his omission. As a nation, whenever calamity comes calling, we are quick to strike “avoidable” from our lexicon of grief and cry out as if each loss is merely an occurrence and not an outcome. Such is the pattern that entraps issue after issue — COVID-19, abortion, climate change, healthcare — and has found yet another woefully familiar exhibit in Tuesday’s gun violence.
As we attempt to process and mourn the Uvalde shooting’s fallout, I cannot help but observe that, again, America postures as if it couldn’t have been predicted. As if it couldn’t have been predicted that if the “right to bear arms” is idolized, misconstrued, and untempered by meaningful legislation, it is inevitable that those arms will eventually — and often — be borne for harm. As if it couldn’t have been predicted that the blunders and willful ignorance of our past precipitate the cataclysms of our present.
Instead, we are shocked when every president must address the public for his own iteration of Sandy Hook, when consecutive mass shootings are separated by less than a fortnight, when the funerals for last week’s dead have barely been held before this week’s are commissioned. Instead, we hubristically talk of lofty ideals like change and justice and life, and that is all we do: talk. Engage in “discourse.” Cry some if we are feeling especially despondent. And then we forget — we must, if only to create mental vacancies that tomorrow’s slices of hell can occupy when they come to Main Street, to suburbia, to downtown metros, to churches, to grocery stores, to schools.
The forgetting is most powerful at sometimes trivial, sometimes significant moments: During dinner conversations or on holidays, or just before the next tragedy occurs, or at the ballot box. When the chips are down and the tensions are up, the body politic becomes the body amnesiac — and I need not explicate that collective forgetting is just as potent as collective remembrance. Perhaps more so. Because when hurt is stricken from memory, we enable its repetition, and when pain is repeatedly endured, it becomes increasingly less memorable. Today we forget so that tomorrow we can forget again.
Because if we don’t forget, one day it will be too much — maybe it already is. Former professor of philosophy and current Beloit College Provost and Dean Eric Boynton told NPR as much in its Sunday special on comprehending loss after one million American deaths to COVID-19. He continued on to say that even managing to operate a livelihood in an environment saturated with perpetual sorrow necessarily requires us to, at some point, choose to wipe our recollections clean.
As far as choices go, then, our strategic memory loss and inaction are far from irrational: After all, no matter what we choose, most of us lack the ability to make the final call. Instead, we are restricted to waiting for progress to come from the State House or the Governor’s mansion, from Capitol Hill or Pennsylvania Avenue. Unluckily enough, though, those in power are masters of self-repression, glad to tune out the discontented voices of righteously angry constituents, to reelect and endorse incumbents with whom the populace is dissatisfied, to rally behind stances they know are untrue and policies they know do not work, and to facilitate the multiplication of trials that break the nation’s heart.
When America tactfully changes the subject and distracts from the solution, it is, fundamentally, a choice. That must be why in the days following the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Sen. Marco Rubio, at a nationally broadcasted town hall, chose to defend his affiliation with the NRA rather than make substantive commitments to gun regulation. That must be why, in spring 2019, prospective candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene chose to accost a survivor of that very shooting on the streets of Washington, D.C., accusing him of capitulating to liberal propaganda. That must be why Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has chosen to speak at an NRA convention in Houston this weekend while 19 mothers in Uvalde will mourn the absence of their children. That must be why Joe Biden chose to abstain from discussing gun control as he addressed a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., last week after the city’s own mass shooting, and many agreed that it “just wasn’t the right time to talk about it.” That must be why parents in my Georgia hometown told me that, although gun violence “broke their hearts,” they would always choose “pro-life” candidates at the ballot — the same “pro-life” candidates who unswervingly advocate against gun regulation. The irony is maddening. Sickening. Lethal.
When will our hearts have been broken enough? When will it be the perfect time? When will we recognize that the rights ostensibly guaranteed in our Constitution, even the Second Amendment, are not only for us but for posterity, that they are for a next generation now dying by our own leaders’ indolence? When will we realize that this national suffering is self-inflicted, predictable, preventable, and the product of choices? A nebulous right to bear arms chosen over the right to school safety, unborn lives chosen over the lives of today’s students, expediency chosen over action.
We could and should reckon with these choices — but that would require memory, wouldn’t it? Instead, amid our collective forgetting, the American experience becomes one of grief for tragedies we cannot remember and faulty choices we continue to make. We grieve as we cast ballots for leaders who protect a maladaptive, disastrous status quo. We grieve as we undertake the mundane tasks of commuting to work or typing out emails trying to keep our hands from shaking with fear, anger, and possibly guilt. We grieve as we recline on our couches to the tune of a sitcom and sometimes, in a bout of self-flagellation, an hour of primetime news. We grieve as we rehearse and recite the same old, superficial comforts in response to “new” but identically avoidable tragedies.
This is the present we have picked. A present in which the American way becomes the mere skill of pretending that there is nothing to grieve even as we mourn.
Amid the darkness of predictable tragedy, my prognostication for tomorrow remains grim. Tomorrow, we will likely go about our lives, embarking on campaigns of deliberate desensitization in attempts to cajole ourselves into functionality. Tomorrow, on the day that the 19 fallen children at Robb Elementary School were meant to begin summer break, we will likely begin the necessary process of forgetting. Tomorrow, our leaders will be afforded the opportunity to pass meaningful gun legislation, to put lobbyists’ interests and blind ideologies aside, to ensure that preventable death is the exception rather than the rule, to choose progress over self-sabotage and paralysis. Tomorrow, though, I fear, they will choose wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time.
Image by Tim Mudd licensed under the Unsplash License.
