Violent Nation.

Every few weeks our lives are interrupted by breaking news about innocent people being gunned down in classrooms, movie theaters, nightclubs, churches, and Etc. During these highly stressful times, we stop what we are doing to reflect on tha preciousness and fragility of lyfe, we offer our prayers and condolences to tha families affected by tha tragedies and we tell ourselves this isn’t America. Violence is a constitutive part of our history. America grew out of a violent revolution and hasn’t looked back. In tha Gospel of Saint Luke, we are told that we can know a tree by tha fruit it produces. In America, we scorn and rebuke our rotten apples, but we refuse to indict tha tree that produced them. We have to quit using tha same shocked language we apply to these tragedies and come to grips with tha fact that this is normal. America is, and always has been a violent nation.

Our culture has glamorized violence through novels, television, movies and video games. Tha spike in mass shootings over the last decade is a generational consequence of celebrating death more than lyfe. America’s fascination with violence consciously and unconsciously affects many of us in different ways.It starts out as innocent games of cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers. We send these same kids to schools that have canonized our nation’s most historic battlegrounds and immortalized tha soldiers who fought and died on those sacred grounds. We have Civil War reenactments where we simulate tha experience of being on some of America’s most deadly killing fields. For every person truly repulsed by depictions of violence, there are throngs of people canceling out their voices.Contrary to what we tell ourselves, tha majority of mass shootings aren’t committed by people with a history of mental illness. These are meticulously calculated events designed to inflict as much pain and terror as possible. Too often we jump to tha conclusion that tha shooter must have been “crazy.” This is disingenuous. Saying someone is crazy is an easier pill to swallow than accepting tha fact that our culture continues producing more and more people capable of committing these crimes.

There are so many Americans invested in tha myths associated with America that (as a nation) we can’t look critically at this problem. Too many people are working overtime to systematically disconnect these shootings from each other and often tha motives behind them. America is under siege by tha threat of random violence and we won’t accept tha fact that our culture is complicit in some of the carnage we have seen.America is stuck in a perpetual cycle of grief, inaction, and denial. Our politicians don’t have tha courage to stand up to tha gun lobby and we won’t look in tha mirror. These stories start with a hail of bullets and end in death and prayers. We keep doing tha same thing over and over and have tha nerve to question the results.

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