Written by Marianne Mansfield
To my fellow Americans,
What the hell is it going to take? How many more killings of innocents? How many more madmen, and they are largely men, acting on malignant and self-righteous bigotry? How many more days when our country wakes up to the loss of simply good people? How many more men, women, and children? Children will we lose before we acknowledge what we know to be true? How much more before we stand up and start screaming it?
We have a massive, structural cancer rotting us from the inside out.
We can ignore it no longer. We can’t afford to. Not only is it robbing us of the aggregated benefit amassed when good people live among us, it is also slowly, stealthily, and I fear irreversibly inuring our national psyche to its presence.
Is it all about the guns? I wish I could make it so, because despite the “Big Bad Wolf” NRA folderol, it would be relatively easier to take deadly weapons out of the hands of maniacs that it will be for us to eradicate the real issue.
The real issue is hatred. Hatred that countervails this uniquely human quality from which springs our compassion for one another.
When we are compassionate, we care for each other. Stranger or sibling, we tend to the well-being of those around us. We see pain, and we offer care. When we see loneliness, we offer our presence. Sadness, a smile or a joke. Hunger, sustenance.
And when we are happy, we share our joy. When we are content, we share our circumstance. When we are safe, we invite others to join us in our shelter.
That’s compassion.
Walking into a church and shooting nine people in Charleston, South Carolina? That’s cancerous, cold-hearted, inhumane hatred.
In recent history—in the last few months, even—there have been far too many other examples of the same mayhem. Each time, our president has come before us to express our national sadness and offer our collective support to the communities suffering the loss. This time, additionally, he addressed every one of us.
Whatever else you think of President Obama, I can’t imagine an American among us not being stirred by his comments about the Charleston deaths. “This type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” The leader of this country, the alleged leader of the free world, laid out the chillingly lethal blade of absolute truth right before our eyes.
When we consider our country’s position in world politics, is this one of the markers we want for our legacy? That we are a country where it is pretty damned easy for citizens to kill people they don’t like? Or are we not as advanced as we’d like to pretend we are?
Yes, we need to do something about gun control, and before you start at me, forget it. Guns in the possession of haters kill people. Haters use guns to kill people. You can reorder the words in the sentence to make it read however you want it to. The fact is that no amount of blow and bluster can obfuscate the ironclad connection. Haters. Guns. Kill.
We need more than a solid system of gun control, however. We need to grab whatever sharp implement that we as a society can put our hands on and begin to pry the searing coal of hatred from our bellies. Will the pain be unbearable? I suspect that, at points, it will. Will various groups of us cry out in anguish? I hope so. It has to be painful to give us confidence that we are digging in the right spot. Will we occasionally black out from the loss of blood? Probably, but when our eyes flutter open again, we will continue our probe.
For as we dig, we will be driven forward by the shared belief that we can take no more of the senseless, stupid, meaningless hatred in this land. We will take no more.
My fellow Americans, we must take no more.
