Words are inadequate in the face of hate. Yet speak we must.
In April 1999, I took my daughters on a trip to Charlottesville, Va., to see where I went to graduate school at “Mr. Jefferson’s Academical Village.” But on our second morning there, the television covered news of a stunning, unprecedented horror: Thirteen shot dead at Columbine High in Littleton, Colo.
I’d lived close by in Denver.
This was unfathomable.
In 2007, April 16, I led a prayer service the evening of the Virginia Tech massacre. Thirty-two dead. Beyond imagining.
On April 3, 2009, 13 were shot dead in the town where I went to university, Binghamton.
On Dec. 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed 20 elementary schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, grief counseling. The shooter’s mother had bought Lanza firearms.
On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof shot and killed nine people in Charleston, S.C. In their church. Because they were Black. In the church I was serving we prayed for the victims and their families. But I didn’t rewrite my sermon to address this.
On June 12, 2016, 49 people were killed in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. We prayed for the victims and their families in our prayers. But I didn’t rewrite my sermon to address this.
In 2018, on Valentine’s Day, a shooter went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and killed 17 stu
variant strains that are more infectious, more deadly or more resistant to our vaccines.
Other nations face the same dilemma. Consider New Zealand, which has so completely eradicated COVID-19 that jampacked outdoor concerts can be held with nobody wearing masks. Why would authorities there risk admitting tourists from the United States, which is still seeing more than 50,000 new cases per day? Even when we get that number down to 10,000 a day, as Anthony Fauci wants, how could New Zealand allow Americans in when the average of daily new cases there is less than one?
The thing is, though, that even the sturdiest walls erected against a virus will inevitably leak. A small island nation such as New Zealand can isolate itself more effectively than the vast United States, with its thousands of miles of land borders and coastlines. But no country can totally seal itself off from the outside world.
That is why Biden was right to take two important steps. Last week, the White House announced plans to send 4 million doses of the Astrazeneca vaccine — found effective against the virus, but not yet approved for use in the United States — to Mexico and Canada. The Biden administration has framed this as a “loan,” not a gift. But really it is a wise investment that will augment, at least incrementally, the lagging vaccination programs of our closest neighbors.
The administration has also announced it will donate $4 billion to the Covax Facility, an initiative that’s trying to ensure fair distribution of vaccines to poor countries as well as rich ones.
We need to do more. This is a crisis in which generosity and self-interest coincide. The plain truth is that we won’t get back to normal until everybody does.