Days like this

     On days like this, the only decent thing is to let electoral politics drop. So there will be no cut and parry fighting today; no rhetorical bar fights with various elements of the Right. Today, after the massacre in Aurora, a decent respect for our countrymen and our Country -- for the shared values and common history which bind the several nations of this federal Union -- impels us to stop with surficial things, and to gaze beneath the waves, into the deep, into dark, fathomless waters.

     Why is it that our nation so regularly sees this kind of violence? Why does our neighbor to the North, republican in all but name, and with equal access to guns -- why is it that they see this so much less frequently than we do? This is not to say there is not violence in Canada; there is. But why this gory succession of mass murder in America? There was Columbine -- a kind of satanic Star of Bethlehem, Lucifer's light truly, bringing warning of worse things to come; and then 9/11, a veritable sounding of Gabriel's awful Trumpet, calling all of world-civilization's wicked, cruel, and nihilistic urges to the gory field. But even before Columbine and September 11th, before Baghdad and Fallujah, before London and Madrid, before this all, there were the other, smaller attacks -- at Jonestown, in Arkansas, in 1998, and at Paducah, Kentucky, in 1997, where children shot dead other children. I remember in my own time, in February, 1996, a day with lovely snow beginning flurries beginning preparatory to a Nor'easter, getting our report cards before February Vacation and then getting let out early into the snow and the stacking cordwood because someone in the Eighth Grade had brought a gun to school, causing Charlie Chandler and I to exchange disbelieving and quizzical looks while we found out whether we'd managed a B in pre-algebra. What was the meaning of that, this overwhelming desire for murder among our young people?

      I don't claim to have any special insight on the question. And yet, when we think of it, of the enormity of these massacres that toll in grim succession across all corners of our land, we must come to the conclusion that there is something awry in the national soul; something not unrelated to the political assassinations and racial violence of the 1960s, perhaps not unrelated to the epochal fratricide that forged the modern nation one hundred years before that. Perhaps, even, going back to the Old Testament scale slaughter, and Total War, of the Great Swamp Fight in King Philip's War, and the Pequot Fort at Mystic three decades prior.

    Where there has been violence in the past, we may only expiate it; when violence is currently occurring throughout and beyond our society, and in our own name, we may put a stop to it, and obviate the need for any future atonement. I cannot say, but I wonder if these massacres would cease, if, first foregoing the external symptoms of our national illness, we as a People could effect a transformation of the National Soul.

  What I mean to say is, we ought to cease supporting a government that is the greatest purveyor of violence abroad in the world today.

 We ought to cease supporting police departments that make everyday life for our racial minorities something out of an authoritarian nightmare, just as we ought no longer support a prison system that has become a racial gulag.

   We ought to no longer tolerate the vigilantes in our midst who seek to attack immigrants seeking a better life, or to intimidate Muslims seeking to peacefully practice their Faith.

     We ought no longer tolerate those persons, corporations, and economic interests whose irresponsible and grasping acquisitiveness makes of everyday life a place of violence for the poor, the unemployed, and the sick.

     We ought no longer tolerate the many cruelties built into our institutions of education, from the endemic sexual violence of universities to the subtler, but still violent, competitiveness which makes of learning a mere footrace, and of knowledge a mere mockery.

    Finally, we ought to look within ourselves, into our own souls, and to identify what is violent there; to identify it, and to root it out, with Lovingkindness, with Justice, and with Peace.

     Only then, I think, shall we find peace in this country and in our own hearts.