This Nation is Broken and … Devolving
In this 21st century, the technology and knowledge our ancestors never had now exists to lead a more sustainable and peaceful life as never before in our collective human history. But a certain political party seems bent on sabotaging progress.
When I last wrote here on Medium— on Christmas, 2020, my post literally ended upon hearing news reports of a bomb that detonated in a recreational vehicle in downtown Nashville, Tennessee. Turns out residents had been calling 911 to report hearing gunshots early that Christmas morning.
Police located a recreational vehicle (RV) parked in front of a commercial communications building playing a pre-recorded message for residents to evacuate the area with a countdown to an explosion.
As officers began to evacuate the area, the RV exploded. The explosion caused a fire within the building, as well as flooding on the first and second floors following two water main breaks. According to a source familiar with the incident, it disrupted about 170 public safety answering points (PSAPs) in the immediate and neighboring areas, and as far as Kentucky and Alabama. Telephone, data, and internet outages were seen as far as Atlanta, Ga. — Communications Dependicies Case Study: Nashville “Christmas Day” Bombing
That day was especially unsettling. Honestly, I hadn’t wanted to look back on that piece until somewhat recently. A month ago, I’d been wanting to restart writing here on Medium, but realized I needed to connect back to that post. Difficult — since, like most people — I basically want to keep unpleasant thoughts out of my mind.
As I looked upon that post, I realize many other unsettling events have ensued since then. It’s as if I’ve blacked out and awoken more than two years later. Much has happened since. My thoughts that Christmas day in 2020 had spilled out in one stream of consciousness rant.
It happened again … and again …
On Monday, March 27, 2023 — national news covered the chilling Tennessee school murders of three children and three adults at a private Christian school by a female transgendering into a male.
A few days later, I learned she/he had bought SEVEN weapons, including assault rifles, despite being under treatment for a mental disorder — apparently there are no “red flag” laws in Tennessee, which has some of the weakest gun laws. In fact, Tennessee is a permitless carry state.
How or why did she/he turn to “toxic masculinity” at its most extreme? Is it truly just about the easy availability of the guns?
I went to bed, trying to sort out my unease by writing in my journal. What was that city? Could they be one and the same, I wondered as I fell asleep.
That next morning, I was wide awake at 5:21 a.m. Turns out that BOTH these chilling incidents had captured national news. Gunshots and trauma in NASHVILLE, Tennessee.
Nashville, where some of the world’s most legendary musicians — Dolly Parton, Bon Jovi, Robert Plant, Black Eyed Peas, Kid Rock and Michael Buble connected with millions, expressing the essence of human experience in beauty! The music business in that city brings in almost 36 percent of the state’s GDP.
But now, Nashville is again belting out anguish and trauma from deepest pit of their souls, like that Christmas 2020 bombing.
Why is this happening?
I saw on social media, Christmas card photos of the newly-elected far-right, Republican Tennessee U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles and his family, all but the youngest daughter bearing assault rifles. Ogles had said, “My family and I are devastated by the tragedy that took place at The Covenant School in Nashville this morning. We are sending our thoughts and prayers to the families of those lost. As a father of three, I am utterly heartbroken by this senseless act of violence."
I wondered, how is that statement believable? Given the over 377 school shootings since the horrors of Columbine, how could anyone happily grin, bearing weapons of war with their children in their Christmas greetings? The Ogles are not the only political family to do that. Some had admittedly thought it is funny.
But I am sure many of the over 349,000 students who have experienced gun violence since Columbine would think this attitude is not just appalling, but sociopathic.
These are high-velocity weapons that blow away children’s bodies and faces to the point where they are unidentifiable, where family members must provide DNA swabs to identify their loved ones.
How can anyone in their right mind equate such stupendous horror inflicted on innocent lives — especially that of CHILDREN — with the idea of Christmas?
Have they absolutely gone mad?
This is obviously a question for psychologists. What kind of violence happened somewhere in their psyches, that they readily identify with the perpetrators, rather than the healers of war and violence?
Tennessee U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett said, “We’re not gonna fix it,” in response to the latest tragedy, trying to explain his father’s logic — a veteran who fought in World War II and believed there will always be criminals with a gun.
When Burchett was asked about whether he was worried about his child being shot in school, he said she was being homeschooled. That is hardly a worthwhile solution.
And what about the other kids who are not home schooled? Or what about a shooter suddenly showing up in a shopping mall or their church, for that matter?
Evidently, Burchett’s comments drew outrage. The next day, Nashville teenage protesters angrily demanded common sense gun laws in the Tennessee state Capitol. And on the following Monday, thousands of students protested, walking out of class at 10:13 a.m., marking a week after the first 911 call. Many carried signs such as, “WE just want to LIVE through HIGH SCHOOL,” “Why are YOUR GUNS more important than MY LIFE?” and “Schools are not war zones.”
Tennessee state House Speaker Cameron Sexton equated such protests with the Jan. 6 insurrection. How utter nonsense! None of these KIDS brought any kind of weapons, tasers, clubs to physically beat police or lawmakers, nor threatened to hang any top official.
Like the Vietnam Generation—fears of dying abroad or dying in their homeland
It is heartbreaking to see such young faces fearing for their lives.
I never once felt afraid going to school in the 1960s and ’70s. What are we doing to our children?
Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for children and teens; car accidents used to kill children more than guns!
And active shooter drills are a part of their lives for all age groups and the trauma real-life simulations inflict are widely debated.
What’s happening to this generation reminds me of my husband’s generation—only five years older than me, his grade school years had drills where students hid under their desks in case of nuclear bomb attack from the Soviet Union. Then his high school years were spent with the underlying fear of the Vietnam War draft and dying far away from home. He remembers registering for the draft when he turned 17. Mass protests against the war and for civil rights and women’s rights gripped the nation in those times. Luckily, President Nixon finally withdrew all U.S. combat troops from Vietnam just a few months later.
But now, since the ban on assault weapons sunset in 2004 and was not reinstated, students are facing the increased threat of random deaths — not in a foreign land far from loved ones — but at home, in their schools/colleges, parades, concerts, theaters, restaurants, malls, bars/nighclubs and even churches.
A study conducted by injury epidemiologists and trauma surgeons in 2019 calculated that the risk of a person in the U.S. dying in a mass shooting was 70% lower during the period in which the assault weapons ban was active. The proportion of overall gun homicides resulting from mass shootings was also down, with nine fewer mass-shooting-related fatalities per 10,000 shooting deaths. — Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery data analysis
Today’s students deserve a chance at living a life without fear
By the time I was in high school in 1974, my age group only experienced school fire drills — of which there have been ZERO fatal school fires in the last 64 years.
The last school fire was on Dec. 1, 1958, at Our Lady of the Angels School in Chicago. Ninety-two children and three nuns died in that horrific tragedy.
Here’s the Life Magazine photo that became world-famous and changed everything about in fire safety in schools. Ten-year-old John Jajkowski succumbed to smoke inhalation just beneath his classroom’s second floor window waiting to be rescued by firefighters, his white uniformed shirt blackened by smoke.
Will showing the photos of the AR-15 mutilated bodies of children finally stop the carnage? We, the public have never seen how a barrage of high-velocity bullets mangle bodies so devastatingly that family members must supply a DNA sample to identify their loved one. Why should families and children have to bear such scarring experiences alone? Would such horrible images galvanize the public to demand real reform? Moreover, would they change the minds of politicians who seem almost sociopathic in their reluctance to address such change?
Emmett Till’s mother’s decision to hold an open casket of her 14-year-old’s mutilated body at the hands of white supremacists in 1955 catalyzed the civil rights movement. The news about women jumping to their deaths during the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed 149 workers in 1911 ignited safer building codes and labor laws for places of work.
Today’s news and films have all sanitized mass death to the point where it seems we are emotionally detached from the sheer horror such weapons unleash on fellow human beings, images which might otherwise motivate us to prevent such deaths. Businesses, community activists and lawmakers used to work together to prevent such deaths from recurring.
We as a nation have been able to enlist better labor and safer building codes after mass tragedies to prevent fires. We’ve been able to reduce the loss of life from tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes with better science and early weather warnings. Car accidents, injuries and deaths have been reduced through engineering design, to public awareness campaigns and laws regarding drunken driving and seat belt use.
But when it comes to the human mind, perhaps we have met our final frontier — the human mind and how unhealed trauma can affect our perspective.
Today, since Sandy Hook and the murder of 19 6-year-olds, active shooter drills for all age groups have to be especially traumatizing — mass shootings HAVE BEEN occurring regularly since Columbine. And not just in schools, but theaters, bars/nightclubs, malls and even churches!
With over 400 million firearms now in the hands of private citizens and militias, we now have too many guns, over 120 per 100 residents.
This gun violence epidemic is unique to America
When Tennessee U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett said, “We’re not gonna fix it,” referring to gun laws, referring to how his father served in World War II and believes there will always be criminals with a gun, why is the U.S. is the only industrialized nation that does not suffer this type of gun violence epidemic?
But Europe and Japan were directly involved in two world wars. Why don’t they have a similar gun violence epidemic? Neither do other developed nations, like Canada or Australia.
Why is it that the other developed nations — Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia don’t have this problem? I think Burchett needs to rethink what he is saying.
Are those nations not as beholden to the gun lobby and weapons of war on the streets as we are?
And, to top it off, why are mass shooters mostly white males? By this logic, are the gun-obsessed admitting there are proportionately more criminals here in the U.S. than in other nations?
Or, did the other developed nations perhaps learn valuable lessons from two world wars which we here in the U.S. have yet to learn? Have they healed in ways we have not? After all, psychologists now know that unhealed trauma can unconsciously recur in successive generations. Have we been letting trauma fester and rot minds?
To make things worse, shockingly, a few days after the large student protests began, Tennessee state House Republicans DID expel two of three state House Democrats they had threatened to for siding with the protesting youths. The three lawmakers had taken to the floor, using their First Amendment rights to demand strong gun control, on behalf of their constituents. (The last time Tennessee lawmakers were expelled was during the Civil War, and more recently two more for a crime and sexual misconduct.)
This happened almost 55 years later to the day of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee. Ironically, King’s last speech in Tennessee, ironically noted the movement lives or dies in Memphis.
Today it would seem that a new generation has picked up the pieces of this unhealed trauma.
The Republican-dominated state House voted to expel the youngest and newest black representatives of Memphis, Tennessee, state Rep. Justin Pearson, along with state Rep. Justin Jones of Nashville due to their breaking rules of “decorum” when they were not allowed to speak during the session and spoke out during a recess. The white female legislator, state Rep. Gloria Johnson, was spared expulsion by one vote.
Is the expulsion of state lawmakers after they used their Constitutional free speech rights in support of their student constituents an ominous precedent in a state which has ranked last in preserving democracy? (As of this writing, the Nashville Council, which is responsible for appointing vacant state representative seats, has unanimous re-appointed state Rep. Jones.)
Soul-wrenchingly, the Nashville Covenant school tragedy marked the 39th school shooting this year and the 130th mass shooting in America, more than the number of days in the year. Did that shooting happen because Tennessee has some of the most lax gun laws in America?
Despite this seemingly unending traumatic gun violence, the Republican party steadfastly REFUSES even the most common sense gun laws — such as background checks, red flag laws, and above all, a ban on assault weapons of war and other high-velocity firearms intended to rapidly kill a high number of PEOPLE. Tennessee is one of 26 states to allow permitless carry of weapons!
This begs the question: Are those legislators grooming us, the nation for violence and chaos in the downfall of this once wondrous nation?
And now, as I am trying to finish this post, I hear of ANOTHER MASS SHOOTING with FIVE DEAD, EIGHT WOUNDED in Louisville, Kentucky, this time at a bank, at 8:30 a.m. Preliminary reports from a witness that saw a man with a “long-gun.”
And just two miles away, ANOTHER SHOOTING just outside a community college.
It certainly seems we haven’t healed from the past traumas of our ancestors. Are we destined to continue this age-old, generational dysfunction of violence and war?
As former Ohio Gov. John Kasich recently said on MSNBC, this generation will have to get out on the streets and protest in the same way their parents’ or grandparents’ generations did to end the Vietnam War and to gain civil rights.
