a starting point…more thoughts to come
These days, it’s hard to sit down and write about any one thing. There are just so many issues swirling around in my brain all the time – not unlike the whirlwind of our news cycle. Polarization around immigration, race, guns, marriage, and the list goes on and on… It’s exhausting trying to keep up with where I stand, where my friends and family stand, who am I talking to right now – do I need to be careful about what I say to this person? Do I need to have my filter on? Do I need to avoid certain subjects for the sake of the relationship as a whole? I am not even talking about talking to people across ethnic or cultural divides…that always involves education, humility, and a bent towards grace…I am talking about people with whom I have previously had almost everything in common – it is absolutely exhausting and it’s too much work.
Last Friday, as my family was loaded up in the mini van on the way to a quick vacation in Chicago, I got a text from my son’s elementary school that said the schools were being placed on high alert and increasing police presence due to a situation in Noblesville – a mere 10 miles away. I immediately checked the news only to realize the horror that there was an active shooter situation. Of course, this must be some sort of misunderstanding, I thought, recalling the bomb threats that proved nothing throughout my time in high school. No…it wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was a seventh grader, a SEVENTH GRADER, who had brought two handguns to his middle school and wounded several people.
Suddenly, all the swirling and thinking and work, it just stopped. There was just stillness, and shallow breaths, and terror. And then there was anger. Just a raging anger that this keeps happening and it seems like nothing ever changes. I looked back at my boys, one of whom will start kindergarten this fall, and I felt simultaneous swells of gratitude and fear. We are here. We are safe. We are together. But also, I don’t have any control at all over how long this beautiful season will last. As I realized that the anger was driven so much by fear and powerlessness, I (being a human with a narrative making brain) started to try to figure out how all of these things fit together. What did I need to do. Immediately, my husband and I started talking about gun control. Yes, we need more common sense gun reform. Yes, we have a beautiful constitution, but you also have to remember it was written in and for a different world than the one we live in now. It has to be a living document for it to serve the people it was intended to serve…not to mention, the people it wasn’t intended to serve.
I remember looking up as the cornfields raced by out my window and saying these words, “I don’t think that’s enough.” It has been easy for me, up till now, to look at gun violence, especially in the setting of a school, and just think, oh, we need gun control. It was that “simple.” And then it happened here, my yoga teacher in the adjacent room hiding and calming her kids while she barricaded the door. Yes, we need to look at the way that we treat guns from a policy standpoint, but there is more to it than that…
I started to think about what a thirteen year old boy must be going through to bring him to this place. I was thinking about all the kids huddled in a corner – fearful and powerless. I thought of the teachers, who did not sign up to be bodyguards, who pushed through their own fear to protect them. I continued to scroll through my newsfeed and saw all of these articles about the shooting, and about #wherearethechildren, and my empath heart was just broken open.
You guys, I do think we have a gun problem, but I think at the root of it all, we have a dehumanization problem. We look at people and evaluate their worth based on their effect on us, their effect on the environment around them, their effect on our sense of certainty, their effect on our traditions, their effect on our power. It seems to boil down to this – what do we stand to gain or lose from their existence in “our” world? We have completely lost the capacity for empathy, especially empathy for the “other,” and it is literally killing us. The gap between those who have and those who don’t grows wider and wider, and let me tell you, powerlessness can make one do desperate things. Suddenly, I started to see things a little more clearly. All the people out their screaming about their second amendment rights – maybe they are afraid. Afraid that they will lose something that ameliorates their sense of powerlessness. The people who balk when you start talking about privilege and systemic racism – maybe they are afraid that for someone else to gain some power and agency, means that they will lose some of their own. Those who can look at an immigrant child in a detention center, separated from a loving parent, and say, “well, you shouldn’t have broken the law…” – maybe they are afraid that acknowledging the pain and humanity here would mean asserting that following the rules does not give them the kind of control and protection that they rely on to not feel powerless.
We have to start seeing each other. We have to see the fear behind the anger and the entrenched, self-protective beliefs. Powerlessness can lead to dehumanization, to desperation, to violence, to anger…but powerlessness can also lead to strength. If you come from a position where you have grown up with a relatively large amount of agency, it feels like the scariest thing in the world. There are those, however, who had to make friends with powerlessness at a young age. Who had to learn that they could accept it, or fight it tooth and nail no matter the cost. Those who have accepted it, find a sense of agency and power that, I believe, comes from Love – from being made in God’s Image. It is when we realize we are not in control, when we let go of what we hold so tightly too, that a strength beyond us, a peace beyond us, and a hope beyond us rises up.
I am not saying to stop fighting for justice. I am simply saying that, especially to those of us with a lot of privilege, we have to stop looking at people as objects in our world, who have either a positive or negative effect on our lives, and start seeing them as human beings, as God’s image bearers, as children of the Divine, as people of inherent worth and value. We are all afraid – let’s be afraid together and do something beautiful with it.
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