Americans cling to their guns
Aweek today, Americans head to the polls to elect 435 people to the House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 Senate seats, 39 state governors and participate in a host of other elections and referendums at the state and county level. Put another way, the first Tuesday of November marks the two-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election as president.
Some, of course, can’t be bothered to wait to vote, can’t be bothered to mark a ballot, can’t be bothered with the inconveniences of democracy and law.
Instead, they vote with bombs, guns and bullets.
They send bombs to former presidents and a news network.
They enter a grocery store in Louisville, Ky., and shoot the black people inside, killing two of them, after first trying to enter a predominately African-American Baptist church.
They enter a Jewish synagogue and open fire, killing 11 people. The youngest victim was 54 years old; the oldest, Rose Mallinger, was 97. Her 61-year-old daughter was among the wounded. Two brothers died together. A husband and wife died together. A family doctor died.
Besides humanity, decency and tolerance, these horrible attackers also lack irony.
They pick up their weapons for justice, yet they have no faith in the law. They say they fight for freedom, yet they have no belief in democracy.
Their damaged minds have been filled with hate and then whipped into a frenzy by a president who insists on respect “for both sides” at an anti-racism rally in Charlottesville, where a protester was killed by another angry man driving his car into the crowd.
For Trump and the talking heads at Fox News to say they’re not partially responsible for heating up the hateful rhetoric to broil is as ridiculous as to say Marc Antony had no idea the people would riot after his “Friends, Roman, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
When people in power with audiences of tens of millions call other Ameicans “evil” and the “enemy of the people” long enough, language used only in times of war to motivate the population to fight against an outside threat, a handful of individuals won’t understand that the words weren’t meant literally, that it was just meant to “fire up the base,” that it was a joke or “lulz,” as they say on the alt-right.
Their hearts and minds filled with anger and hate, they attack the blacks, the Jews, the gays, the others.
But they aren’t the only ones with power, with the means to act.
At a community rally held just hours after Saturday’s shooting in Pittsburgh, citizens
were imploring one another to go out and vote. Hateful men have tried to impose their will through fear and murder before and they will again but the true citizens join their peers in the ballot box and the true patriots sacrifice their lives so their fellow citizens may continue to enjoy that right.
These should be glorious times to be an American and to live in the United States. Most of its residents enjoy freedom, wealth, power and luxury. It is home to the world’s oldest democracy, to a constitution that inspired peoples around the globe, including Canada, to govern themselves. Despite its many shortcomings, it is where much of the finest work in education, the arts, entertainment, innovation and science happens. Despite its tarnished reputation and its many shortcomings, the rest of the world, including Canada, still looks to America for guidance, for strength, for leadership.
Instead, tens of millions of Americans live in fear, terrified that the rapists from Mexico, the gangsters from the ghetto, the homosexuals, the transgenders, the Muslims, the Asians, the Jews, the atheists, the academics, the reporters and the liberals are coming to take their money, their guns, their churches, their neighbourhoods, their schools, their TV shows, their music, their history, their language and especially their white privilege away.
The best of America has always been its hope in a better future and the willingness
of Americans to work with others towards that future. The worst of America has always been its frontier mentality, that it is under attack from both inside and out and that Americans must turn back the clock to some mythical past by resorting to acts of cruelty and abuses of power that run counter to the forward-looking spirit of its optimistic founders and their enduring Declaration of Independence.
The founders knew their wisdom wasn’t perfect, that time and progress would require their Constitution to be updated. One of those updates – the Second Amendment – was “the right of the people to keep and bear arms.” That update was written at a time when the United States lacked a standing army to repel invading forces or to restore order on its streets, so the people would be called upon to fight.
There is plenty of room in a democracy for guns and for lawful gun owners but there must come a day when Americans – who can always be counted upon to do the right thing after exhausting all other possibilities, as Winston Churchill noted – realize that gun control isn’t an assault on freedom.
The Republic can survive without assault rifles in every home and armed security guards in every school and place of worship.
That kind of change, however, can only happen when people exercise their power to vote.