I want to begin the conversation today with heartfelt thanks to those of you who responded with genuine concern to my short column last week in the aftermath of the tragic shootings at Michigan State University. My daughter, a student at MSU, was physically unharmed. But like so many others she is struggling to process the trauma and reorder what she knew of the sense of security and logic in her world. And the tragedy will forever smother the families that were directly affected by the violence. I was too overwhelmed to make any kind of coherent points or arguments about what had transpired, and scores of you wrote to say you understood. But one reader, Karl, made a point that cut through my fog of shock and grief: I hope you find words to describe what you felt and find a way to grieve the loss of safety regarding your daughter. You are a newsman used to printing the truth as best you can. I hope to see your mixture of relief at her safety and grieving the loss of her innocence, feel the thoughts of parents who have no control over this evil, woven into a special reflection. He's right on one point: Like the first responders, doctors, counselors and others who jumped into the work a tragedy like this creates, I have a job to do. But I think he’s wrong to say we have “no control over this evil.” We do. We have gone to the moon and beyond, we created COVID vaccines in less than a year, we found the resolve to rebuild the World Trade Center as a statement to the entire world. Hell, we immediately launched 20 years of war overseas as a reaction to the shock of 9/11. But we take mass murder in our hometowns as an unavoidable facet of living in America? In 2022, more people died from the 600+ mass shootings in the U.S. than on that horrifying day in lower Manhattan. We cannot simply throw our hands up, or worse, point fingers at one another in animus or base politics, and accept that nothing can be done. A gunman walks into an elementary school and annihilates dozens of little children; a shooter walks into a church and wipes out a congregation; a man machine-guns scores of concertgoers from a hotel window. And what meaningful change has happened to protect us? Another reader wrote to argue that prayer is action, because God has the power to effect change. Yeah, no. We don’t live in heaven – we live in society here on Earth and humans are making and enforcing the rules. Most countries have figured this out. Thoughts and prayers aren’t getting it done in America. I like problem-solving. Once, when I used to proofread the “games page” of a newspaper I worked at I tried to teach myself the game of bridge by reading the Omar Sharif advice column. Guess what? It failed, and that’s because you cannot work backward from the “effect” end. You have to start at the beginning, with the fundamentals. So much of our nauseating cycle of trauma from gun violence is similar to that. After the latest mass shooting, we have a communal sense of outrage and a flurry of “support.” We divide into our camps and regurgitate the same talking points – gun control laws on one hand, 2nd Amendment defenses on the other. Politicians make impassioned statements and raise more money. And then society acts like the wounds close and moves on … until the next mass shooting. The root elements are obvious but we refuse to address them with action. I do not know the exact pieces that will be needed to change this scourge. But I know it will involve two things: A collective will to get it done, and compromise. There were plenty of people who thought the space program was a waste of money, that the CDC was out to lunch on the vaccines, that the Trade Center should not have been rebuilt, that we had no business in Iraq and Afghanistan. Too bad. America did not sit idle because there were differing points of view – it acted. The agents of all of those decisions are politicians, no ifs, ands or buts. We are past the point for action on this nightmare; there are no excuses for any politician – from the president down to city councilmembers – not to make our safety their No. 1 priority, right now. And all of us need to hold them accountable for this breach of responsibility to their citizens. ###
John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at [email protected]. | 