If you are feeling the same rage and loss and helplessness that I feel in the wake of the latest shooting atrocity I urge you to read Dahlia Lithwick this evening on Slate. I am posting some excerpts but I hope you'll read it all the way through. It is righteous and it is a call to the nation to wake up.
First you hug your child, or your partner, or your neighbor very tight. Because you have now come to understand that in America in 2019, where 251 mass shootings have occurred in 216 days, your loved ones are truly only as safe as the angriest person next to them at a Walmart or outside a bar. They are, in other words, not safe. They are only lucky or unlucky. We tell ourselves we are powerless to do more.
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There are many, many things we can do about domestic terrorism and lax gun laws. But they demand that we toss off the learned helplessness in which we have swaddled ourselves, and reckon with the sick fetishization of the supremacy of whiteness and maleness and guns as transcendent American values. When Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, almost two years ago this week and chanted “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us,” we told ourselves it was a foreign invasion. The mayor of El Paso, Dee Margo, said the same thing at a news conference after Saturday’s massacre: “This person did not come from El Paso. It is not what we’re about. We are a special community, and this would not have happened from an El Pasoan, I can assure you.” But even if these foreign invaders come from out of town, claiming that they own their spaces, and also our spaces, it is not coming from a foreign army. It is coming from America, from the very top and the very bottom, from a long and bloody history, and it is powered by the death cult that is the gun lobby.
Twenty-nine people are dead in under 14 hours. White supremacy, guns, and leadership that evades responsibility for stoking racial fears are the causes. We can still do something in the nanosecond between when “too soon” becomes “too late.” Or we can be reduced to pitifully hoping that the ones we love stay lucky until the next time.
I can't publish more than 3 paragraphs here but it is definitely worth reading in its entirety.
slate.com/...