AN AMERICAN SICKNESS
WE discuss motives, but isn’t it always the same motive? “I have murder in my heart.” Why do so many Americans have murder in their hearts?
That is my question after the St. Valentine’s Day shootings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. We all know it is part of a continuing cultural catastrophe. A terrible aspect of the catastrophe is that so many central thoughts about it, and questions, have been flattened by time into clichés. People stop hearing when you mention them. “We talked about that during Columbine, didn’t we? That couldn’t be it.”
So we immediately revert to discussions of gun law, and only gun law. There is much to be improved in that area — I offer a suggestion at the end — but it is not the only part of the story. The story is also who we are now and what shape we’re in.
Away to look at the question is: What has happened the past 40 years or so to produce a society so ill at ease with itself, so prone to violence?
We know. We all say it privately, but it’s so obvious it’s hardly worth saying. We have been swept by social, technological and cultural revolution. The family blew up — divorce, unwed child- bearing. Fatherless sons. Fatherless daughters, too. Poor children with no one to love them. The internet flourished. Porn proliferated. Drugs, legal and illegal. Violent video games, in which nameless people are eliminated and spattered all over the screen. (The Columbine shooters loved and might have been addicted to “Doom.”) The abortion regime settled in, with its fierce, endless yet somehow casual talk about the right to end a life. An increasingly violent entertainment culture — low, hypersexualized, full of anomie and weirdness, allergic to meaning and depth. The old longing for integration gave way to a culture of accusation — you are a supremacist, a misogynist, you are guilty of privilege and defined by your color and class, we don’t let your sort speak here.
So much change, so much of it ungentle. Throughout, was anyone looking to children and what they need? That wasn’t really a salient aim or feature of all the revolutions, was it? The adults were seeing to what they believed were their rights. Kids were a side thought.
At this moment we are in the middle of a reckoning about how disturbed our sexual landscape has become. This past week we turned to violence within marriages. We recently looked at the international sex trade, a phrase that sounds so 18th century but refers to a real and profitable business.
All this change, compressed into 40 years, has produced some good things, even miraculous ones. But it does not feel accidental that America is experi-
encing what appears to be a mentalhealth crisis, especially among the young. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported as many as 20 percent of children 3 to 17 have, in any given year, a mental or emotional illness. There is research indicating depression among teenagers is worsening. National Public Radio recently quoted a 2005 report asserting the percentage of prison inmates with serious mental illness rose from less than 1 percent in 1880 to 21 percent in 2005. Deinstitutionalization swept health care and the psychiatric profession starting in the 1960s, and has continued since. The sick now go to the emergency room or stay among us untreated. In the society we have created the past 40 years, you know we are not making fewer emotionally ill young people, but more.
And here, to me, is the problem. A nation has an atmosphere. It has air it breathes in each day. China has a famous pollution problem: You can see the dirt in the air. America’s air looks clean but there are toxins in it, and they’re making the least defended and protected of us sick. Here is one breath of the air: Two weeks ago the US Senate blocked a bill that would have banned most abortions after 20 weeks. Exceptions were made — the life of the mother, incest and rape. Twenty weeks — right up to the start of the sixth month — seemed reasonable. But Democrats said it was an assault on women’s rights. So as far as the Senate is concerned, you can end the life of a 6- to 9-month-old baby that can live outside the womb, that is not only human but recognizably and obviously human.
And even if you are 100 percent for full-term abortion — even if you think this right must be protected lest we go on a slippery slope and next thing you know they’ll outlaw contraceptives — your own language might have alerted you along the way to your radicalism.
Imagine you are pregnant, in the last trimester, and suddenly feel movement in your belly, a shift from here to there. You say, “Oh my God, feel,” and you take the hand of the father, or of another intimate, and you place it on your stomach. You don’t say, “The fetus lurched,” or “A conglomeration of cells is making itself manifest.” You say, “The baby moved. The baby’s moving.” You say this because it is a baby, and you know it. You say it because in your wonder at it, and at life, you tell the truth.
I should add who used that example with me. Agreat liberal journalist who sees right through his party’s dishonesty on this issue.
The failure to ban late-term abortion is one of those central things we rarely talk about.
And I’ll tell you what I think a teenager absorbs about it, unconsciously, in America. He sees a headline online, he passes a television in an airport, he hears the quick story and he thinks: “If the baby we don’t let live is unimportant, then I guess I am unimportant. And you’re unimportant too.” They don’t even know they’re breathing that in. But it’s there, in the atmosphere, and they’re breathing it in. And it doesn’t make you healthier.
The National Rifle Association too fears their slippery slope, and their fear means nothing common-sensical can be done regarding gun law. Concede anything and it will mean they’re coming for your hunting rifle.
Congress has been talking, at least recently and to some extent, of a trade on immigration. New protections for Dreamers on one hand versus increased border security on the other. This would be a good deal. Dreamers are integrated into American life, and a good many work in education and health care. And America is a great sovereign nation with not only a right but a responsibility to control its own borders. Compromise is often good. Ongun law, Republicans oppose banning assault weapons such as the AR-15, the one the Parkland shooter used, because of the numbers, power and contributions of gun owners and the NRA. Democrats oppose banning late-term abortion because of the numbers, power and contributions of the rising left, feminists and Planned Parenthood.
The idea: Trade banning assault weapons for banning late-term abortion. Make illegal a killing machine and a killing procedure.
In both cases the lives of children would be saved.
Wouldn’t this clean some of the air? Wouldn’t we all breathe a little easier?