Painting by Richard Stott (June 13, 2016). Used by permission of the artist.
Investigators at the scene were overwhelmed by the sounds of endlessly ringing phones coming from the bodies, as people continued to call, hoping for their loved ones to answer.
— CNN
We rise and fall and light from dying embers
remembrances that hope and love last longer,
And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
cannot be killed or swept aside.
— Lin-Manuel Miranda[i]
The Orlando massacre is the 179th mass shooting so far this year in the United States of America.[ii] It will not be the last. There’s too much madness, too many guns, too much hate to hope otherwise. We are angry and we are sad, but then what? Gun worship seems the most powerful religion in America. From presidents to schoolchildren, the blood of countless victims stains its altars. And however much we rage and moan we feel powerless to stay the hand of sacrifice.
Each time it happens, causes are discussed, solutions proposed, and we cry, ‘Never again!’ The pundits wring their hands, the NRA and gun-makers pause briefly to reload, Congress turns a blind eye, and then rat-a-tat-tat! More bodies strewn across our public spaces. The cycle repeats itself endlessly.
Why? Mental illness, social pathologies, alienation, racism, resentment, homophobia, hate, terrorism, profiteering by gun-makers, violence as entertainment, social media copycats, an American predilection for the quick fix and the fast draw—probable causes multiply exponentially.
Songwriter Dan Bern summarized the search for answers in his powerful “Kids’ Prayer,” written after the Springfield, Oregon school shooting in 1996:
And all the world descends to offer up their condolences
And offer up their theories what went wrong
And who and why and when and how:
It’s all the killing day and night on television
It’s all the movies where violence is as natural as breathing
It’s guns and bullets as easily obtainable as candy
It’s video games where you kill and begin to think it’s real
It’s people not having God in their lives anymore
Or it’s all of it, or none of it, or some of it, in various combinations …
As a hate crime directed against the LGBT community, Orlando adds a disturbing new dimension to the plague of gun violence. Whatever blend of madness and calculation drove the killer, he didn’t invent homophobia. He just fed off of it. It is still, sadly, in plentiful supply.
Decades ago, James Baldwin, who was both gay and black, wrote about the American capacity for self-delusion as to the extent of its own sickness. Facing up to our social pathologies, whether racism, bigotry, nativism or gun violence, would endanger the national myth of innocence. Better to remain silent and pretend everything is fine.
“But if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves” (I John 1:8). A sin unconfessed only makes us sicker. In a 1961 conversation with Malcolm X, Baldwin said:
If I know that any one of you has murdered your brother, your mother, and the corpse is in this room and under the table, and I know it, and you know it, and you know I know it, and we cannot talk about it, it takes no time at all before we cannot talk about anything. Before absolute silence descends. And that kind of silence has descended on this country.[iii]
In a gesture of protest, a Connecticut Congressman has vowed to abstain from the “moment of silence” which seems to be the only Congressional response to mass shootings. “Our silence does not honor the victims; it mocks them,” said Rep. Jim Himes.[iv]
Or in the words of Dan Bern, how many Orlandos will it take before we “summon up the sanity to scream?”[v]
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Note: The Pieta image is by British painter and Methodist minister Richard Stott, a member of last October’s Venice Colloquium. He painted it in response to Orlando. Thanks to Ric for letting me use it here. Check out his website, “I ask for wonder.”
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[i] Miranda delivered his “sonnet” during the Tony Awards, the night after the Orlando shooting.
[iii] “Notes for a Hypothetical Novel,” in Nobody Knows My Name, quoted in Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin and the Fear of a Nation,” The New York Review of Books, May 12, 2016, p. 42.
[iv] @jahimes, 5:45 pm, June 12, 2016
[v] Dan Bern, “Kids’ Prayer”
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