Do you remember that the nine year old girl killed in Arizona when the guy shot at that Congress-woman-Gifford’s person in Arizona was the guest of a neighbor? She was a woman responding to the young citizen’s interest in the workings of democracy. “It was women being proud of other women,” said the neighbor’s husband. She got shot, three times, the neighbor did, but her first words upon waking up in the hospital were to ask about the little girl who had been in her charge. From the guilt of some things, even or especially those not your fault, there can be no recovery.
And yet America recovers from earned guilt faster than any nation on earth.
How about the fact that Congress-person Giffords once claimed she owned a Glock and was a decent shot and that the day after her shooting Glock sales went way up due to fear, supposedly, a law restricting them would be passed? (A Glock, as you probably know, is a bad ass gun.)
Do you recall all that?
From an “educational” standpoint, it is hard to imagine anyone in this country still thinks a mass shooting would prompt local or national officials to consider limiting access to potent weaponry. Didn’t the gun fetish crowd learn anything from Columbine and West Virginia? The day before a hurricane or flood you might need to rush out and buy bread or milk, but no amount of collateral death one day will mean you won’t be able to get your guns the next. You are safe. You’re protected: Our nation’s leaders believe in bad-ass guns.
Big breath. Big breath. What does a bullet do to a nine year old girl’s body? Some video game will give you the image.
That the shooting took place on a Saturday meant everyone had a full day of church to mull it over amidst their prayers or whatever it is people do in church after there is blood in the streets. Certainly from a “hmm, maybe there is some kinda higher power trying to say something” point of view, you could do worse than holding up that nine year old girl’s body as a sign. She was born on 9/11 it turned out, and her brother, Dallas, is so named because their Grampa once coached big league baseball, though in this context the name invokes the city in which Kennedy was killed. And this carnage happened a week before America took a day off because Martin Luther King changed the world advocating non-violence. Stringing together so many basic American icons and memorable tragedies in one dead little girl’s corpse may not be what you think god does, but as writing on the wall of who we are, that’s not a bad status update.
Of course neither unhooded Republicans nor lobby-lovered Democrats need time, after this kind of thing, to reflect. They know the script: all the usual suspects say all the transparently suspicious things, everyone able to see those in power protecting themselves, their interests, their ratings, their flimsy sense of self.
The same will be true next time. Before the blood was dry, before the woman who escorted that little girl woke up to feel the guilt to which her country is immune, the ruling class had moved on.
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A year later and Giffords is trotted out for a state of the union. She’s an inspiration now, as well she might be. Otherwise she’s another part of the future we can remember, still a sign too big to see.
Update: Newtown, and nothing new, not today, or any of the days like it.
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When she campaigned with the whole Glock thing she was another woman entering the political arena asking to be
measured against the same by the same false notions of strength and same blood
strewn rhetoric men use. Check out how well I shoot? Can no one get
elected by being strong on peace and restraint and moderation? Or are
such values and such people only good for target practice?
How about it? Mom? Dad?