{"id":59511,"date":"2012-07-25T17:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-07-25T21:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=59511"},"modified":"2012-07-25T20:40:23","modified_gmt":"2012-07-26T00:40:23","slug":"the-cultural-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/fe-911-2\/the-cultural-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cultural Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

It took everything in my power to not think about what happened last week in Aurora. To do so would remind me of that April weekend in 1999 — the weekend after the Columbine shootings — quaking with fear and apprehension for my nephew who was in his first year of high school in northern California. His was a high school similar to the one in Colorado where the unthinkable took place: two young men planned and executed a mass shooting, killing themselves after killing eleven of their fellow students, two of their teachers, and wounding 21 others.<\/p>\n

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Aurora reminded me of how vulnerable we were in those days after Columbine. For my nephew going to a public high school and for his younger sister who would follow him soon after, they were now living in a world where this can happen. <\/p>\n

I felt as though after everything we’ve done to make this world a better place for them, that we had somehow failed them. In the new reality of dealing with the unthinkable, you learn that even the fear<\/em> of losing someone so deeply close to you is an emptying of the heart. How much worse is it when it actually happens?<\/p>\n

Why haven’t we looked at the Aurora tragedy deeper than the usual ‘lone shooter; mentally unstable; random, senseless act’. Nothing done to curtail sales of weapons. Polite expression of regret but firmly adamant position from the NRA that they are not willing to back down. What have we learned? Twelve years since the Columbine event, 25 mass-killings (including Aurora) have happened. Here in America we have come to expect that this is a part of what happens when ‘life happens’. Columbine was the first and biggest breach of our expectations for ‘normal life’ in small town America where people go to live to be safe from the violence of the cities. It has not been the same since.<\/p>\n

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It is a new normal, fearing that one day soon an unexpected, unexplainable act of violence could take any one of us down anywhere and at any time. No matter how safe, how serene. Aurora is now another name of a town notched, with the names of other towns, campuses and malls alongside it, on a dark leather gun belt. It is part of our cultural conversation. The part that says we live in a dangerous world from which we need to do everything possible to stay safe. So, what do we do? We arm ourselves. We look to faster, bigger, badder weapons to make sure no one and nothing will get to us. And nobody, nobody,<\/em> will take those guns away from us. <\/p>\n

In 21st century America, our guns are not for safety. In America, they ARE safety. The killing machine is our security, and the conversations that have flowed from the events of last week in Aurora have reached the dam that, since Columbine, cannot be broken through. Not yet.<\/p>\n

Not when individuals feel so powerless against forces larger than themselves that they need to ‘one-up’ with a semi-automatic weapon and 6,000 bullets. Not when we’ve been attacked by bigger forces in unspeakable acts perpetrated to create an even more fearful society than existed in those days of Columbine: perpetuating war abroad, creating even more terror of more random violence for others on an international scale. We’ve arrived at the place where we have updated Leviticus, taking the bible of Dirty Harry global: the cause (the weapon) is the cure. And we’re stuck.<\/p>\n

Even after the events of Aurora, we’re stuck on the issue of gun control and no politician during this election year is going to go up against the NRA. Strike election year and replace with every year<\/em>: our lawmakers fear the National Rifle Association worse than the meltdown of a local nuclear reactor. Let’s face it, given the way the second amendment of the Constitution has been broadly interpreted (or misinterpreted) over the years, people of all political stripes own guns, and no amount of legal restriction is going to stop guns from being purchased or used. Not now. So there will be no movement from government here or elsewhere.<\/p>\n

But that is really not the point of this rant. The soul of our community and our country has accepted habitual violence and the ritualized, legalized culture of fear built in reaction to it. This fear is enabled by industries profiting from it, and it causes people to imagine that the only thing we can do in response to this dangerous world is to arm against it. That needs to be healed.<\/p>\n

These days, I find myself hungry to engage in a conversation on the Aurora tragedy that doesn’t end with a feeling of resignation that this is the way things are and will be, at least not on the level of our hearts and souls. We need new verbs to create a different path, jumping off the cyclical one we’ve been following. We need new nouns to name what has happened to us so that we know where it comes from,\u00a0what to do and how to stop it from happening to others. We need to alter the structure of our conversation and the stories that keep coming up about people and situations that find resolution through violence — which is not the answer to our social and economic problems, but a reaction.<\/p>\n

Our hearts are capable of being bigger than this. I believe it will be our hearts and souls that will end the culture of fear. In the wake of the Aurora tragedy, can we imagine what a new cultural conversation would sound like, look like? I don’t have any answers yet, and I welcome your thoughts on this in your comments below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It took everything in my power to not think about what happened last week in Aurora. To do so would remind me of that April weekend in 1999 — the weekend after the Columbine shootings — quaking with fear and apprehension for my nephew who was in his first year of high school in northern … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1740],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59511"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}