A Thousand Shards of Glass

The truth is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters – people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day . . . The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice-President and CEO of the National Rifle Association (in a prepared response to the Newtown, Connecticut shootings, 2012)

Recently I was sitting in a London hotel ordering tea. I thanked the waitress and turned to see a woman at a nearby table staring or, more accurately, glaring at me. I smiled, nodded and went back to my tea.

She put down her paper, which carried the headline ‘Massacre’ about the recent shootings in Newtown, Connecticut.

‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘It happens over and over. I don’t believe in some “American Dream”. Who would want such a dream, a nightmare? I sorry to disturb, but children.’

The young woman was nearly in tears and I had the feeling that she or her family had gone through something terrible, perhaps in Croatia or Serbia. I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I wanted to say something to her, to somehow explain that which was inexplicable, or offer something that might comfort her, and me.

‘It is horrible, I know, but you see, it is just who we are and this is simply another dark American day among many. In some ways Americans are lost, I think, and have forgotten how to respect each other, to care for one another or to reason. It sometimes seems that there are those who love their rights of gun ownership more than they love America’s children.

‘How can that be?, you might ask, and I would say again, it is just who we are – not everyone, to be sure, but a powerful lobby comprised of a large number of Americans, powerful enough to prevent change even after such a horrible event. We have had many such events and thousands of our citizens are killed with guns every year and yet nothing changes. But it is not the guns alone, for in other societies like Canada they have guns, too, but they are not killing each other as we do in the United States. I have sometimes wondered if it is us, something about us.

‘We are unconscious, I think, and because of that a danger to ourselves now, and sometimes I think that nothing can wake us from our sleepwalking, not even the murder of children. In spite of all that, I must hope. I must keep just a bit of hope alive and believe that somehow we can wake and change or it becomes too unbearable. I’m so sorry this has upset you so.’

‘Some people say it is our right but I think it’s because we’re afraid.’

A few days later, after stepping into a cab, I heard John Lennon’s voice through the speaker. ‘So this is Christmas and what have you done . . .’ I was silent and, while listening, the memory of another horrible day came to mind, when another American with a gun silenced that voice for ever.

Making my way to the airport, I remembered what a Frenchman had told me in the streets of Paris during a large protest:

It’s funny, yes? You have all the guns in your country and still you are afraid of your government and corporations. We have no guns and the government and corporations are a little afraid of us. That’s funny, yes? Don’t you understand, if you don’t have thousands of people in the streets, it doesn’t matter. It’s numbers of people standing for something that means something, not the guns.

Everywhere that I have traveled in the world, even in countries that dislike America, I have detected a quiet wish, an illusion really. It is an illusion that somewhere there is a place where all things are possible. It is a place not unlike Oz, where you can get anything: a brain, a heart or a future. When the detective in The Maltese Falcon asks Sam Spade, ‘What is it?’ while holding the predator statuette, Humphrey Bogart tells him that it is the stuff that dreams are made of. His line has manifested itself in the imaginations of millions of people as a country, and that country is America or, more to the point, the fictional narrative of America that we Americans have been selling for some time now.

I have learned that few things can anger people more than to have their hopes, which are wrapped up in their illusions, proven false. That is why people around the world can be conflicted, and love and hate America at the same time. America has become a repository of sorts for the hopes, unrealized dreams and wishes of millions. It matters not that the illusion is not true, for myth and belief are powerful forces in the human imagination, and I had a sense that the woman at the hotel was not only angry about the tragedy itself but also disappointed that we had not been what she had dreamed us to be.

I feel for such people, very much so, for they often have difficult lives or have been through something tragic and very much need a life preserver in the form of a perfect place to hang their dreams on. As an American I also long for such a place.

For a number of years now we Americans have lived in a world of black and white and increasingly seem unable to evolve or even consider that we may be wrong, even slightly, in our views about ourselves, or be open to how the rest of the western world perceives us. We have consistently behaved as if we have nothing to learn from anyone, even each other. It has often felt to me that, contained within our hubris and ignorance, Americans have come to believe that we have reached some kind of evolutionary societal perfection. How very odd indeed.

George W. Bush was not unique when he said, ‘You are with us or with the terrorists,’ as he challenged the world to get with us or else. It would seem that winning the argument has become more important than realizing viable solutions to our very serious problems, even the mass murder of children and the role of guns and the National Rifle Association (NRA) in our society. If the killing of children cannot elicit the realization that perhaps, at a minimum, a change in thinking should at least be considered, then I simply do not know what will bring us to a point of national catharsis.

Over and over again, following such tragedies, the NRA and gun activists have taken their old and tattered talking points out of storage and, without reflection or real ideas, simply repeated what a majority of Americans have heard before. It is all so automatic and it has worked in obstructing any meaningful changes to gun control in the United States. It is tragic. In America it is nearly impossible to have a nuanced discussion about guns because, in the view of many gun activists, any attempt to moderate the manufacture or sale of any weapon is viewed as a threat to the access to all weapons. It is a paranoid’s world view.

Whether we Americans face it or not, the reality is that the world is not black and white: it is shades of gray, and a thinking society is best served when it is poised and unafraid to adjust when a change of course becomes self-evidently necessary to the well-being of the entire nation, not just that of a vocal and well-funded minority.

I grew up with guns and I remember the NRA when it seemed rather innocent, a local organization comprised of friends and neighbors who taught gun safety and the proper care of a weapon as well as a gun owner’s responsibilities. But the NRA of today is nothing like that at all. It is a corporate, extremist lobbying organization that is incapable of holding any balanced views. Their business is not to be balanced. Their business is to represent gun manufacturers. The NRA today is nothing more than a very powerful lobbyist for the gun manufacturers.

The irony is that if guns are banned in this country one day, a major player that will have made that possible is the NRA itself. The NRA’s long-held extremist positions, like once making a case for the public’s right to purchase Teflon bullets that go through bulletproof vests, which have been referred to by some criminal elements as ‘cop killers’, not to mention their support for the continued sale of assault rifles and high-capacity ammunition magazines, have many citizens, including some gun owners, viewing the NRA and its supporters as something either out of touch or abhorrent.

I believe them to be the latter, because time and time again, following the killings, the NRA has come out with the mantra that what is needed to protect everyone from such monsters in the future is not gun control but more guns in the hands of ‘law-abiding’ citizens, with the additional perk of being able to carry them as well. This all-purpose NRA mantra, beyond being insensitive when coming on the heels of such killings, is also factually incorrect. There were armed guards at both Columbine and at Virginia Tech, and Fort Hood was a military base for goodness sake.

Law-enforcement officers have illustrated their concerns to me as follows: if they rushed into a movie theater where a shooting was in progress only to be confronted by multiple persons with guns drawn, even with all of their training, how would they know who to shoot? Who is the bad guy and how does the officer make a determination in fractions of seconds? If a law-enforcement officer, with all of his or her training, is so concerned, then how does this play out with all the armed ‘good citizens’, who presumably have much less training, if any?

The NRA never answers such questions, nor do they seemingly listen to law enforcement or anyone else. Forget about rights or laws: they are, first and foremost, about helping their clients, the gun manufacturers, and they do so by strenuously lobbying our frightened, cash-strapped representatives to water down legislation that would restrict gun rights and their manufacture. This must change.

As surely as a tide ebbs and flows, shootings like the recent ones in Newtown create momentary drama in America. The police on TV tell the same stories about what needs to be done, as do the media’s talking heads, who offer a grotesque form of entertainment following such events. Politicians compose legislation to add restrictions, and that legislation is pared down or dropped altogether due to the NRA’s powerful lobbying muscle. The newspapers’ headlines ask the questions they have asked before and that have gone unanswered and go unanswered still. And then, after all of the commotion, indignation and tears recede, we get on with our lives until the next tragedy.

This would suggest that all is peaceful between those dramatic multiple killings, but that is not true. Every day our fellow citizens, children and women among them, are being murdered and maimed with guns. In fact, they are killed by the thousands every year. More people are killed by guns each year than died on September 11.

Sadly, I have come to realize that ‘those’ people are the ‘invisible murdered’ among us. They are not invisible to their community or their loved ones, but to the nation as a whole. The story is not big enough. It is the large multiple murders, like a blockbuster film, that attract a national audience these days and after the reporters and commentators and politicians pack up their curiosity and indignation they move on, as most of us do. And yet, every day throughout America the body count increases. Those invisible among us are children and women and seniors and teenagers. They are our fellow citizens and they are all ‘our’ children.

We Americans should not fear changing course and asking questions and demanding that we and our leaders consider the well-being of the nation above the wishes of businessmen and zealots whose first priorities are to themselves. The sad fact is that in America, until it happens to someone we know personally, little if anything wakes us from our indifference. Americans have become desensitized to violence. This is clear from the countless times violence has happened in our schools, not to mention on the streets and in the homes of America over and over again.

With all the hand-wringing, protests and proposed legislation, as well as the newspaper and TV coverage, I suspect, though I hope to be proven wrong, that little will change, even after the mass murder of children, and that is simply unacceptable, for we owe a debt to one another, and that debt demands that we reflect on our positions but also fight for public policy and legislation that is reasoned and sensible and successful in regard to the well-being of each other and the most vulnerable among us.

My plane touched down in San Francisco and after renting a car I made myself comfortable for the two-hour drive south to Carmel. I played with the car’s radio, moving from station to station, and then John Lennon’s voice filled the cabin. ‘Oh, come on, now,’ I thought. ‘Are you kidding me?’ For it seemed that Lennon had followed me across the sea, as if to remind me of the place to which I had returned and the wish I should keep striving for, before falling into my own complacency. I drove down the crowded freeway in the dark as he sang.

So this is Christmas

And what have you done

Another year over

And a new one just begun . . .

A very merry Christmas

And a happy New Year

Let’s hope it’s a good one

Without any fear