All Most Violent

On Friday, nearly three weeks ago, a knot formed in my stomach and then as I listened to the news another knot, and another, and another, until I was literally brought to the floor in anguish from the knotted weight of the horrors that kept being spoken out of my radio.  

Why do I keep hearing this story over and over again?

Is it an American thing, a gun thing, a unique culture of violence fueled by movies and video games and water guns and nerf guns and dressing up like soldiers for Halloween, or that plus a literally insane problem with the lack of care for those who are mentally ill?

None of it, and all of it. 

But not out of nihilistic futility or depressive inaction or shocked paralysis.   As Kurt Vonnegut writes every time a character dies in Slaughterhouse-Five, “so it goes.”  Dresden, fire bombed, burning flesh, scorched corpses, so it goes.  Nagasaki, so it goes, Hiroshima, so it goes.  It goes and goes and goes.  

Columbine, Oak Creek, Aurora, Wounded Knee, the great American frontier.  So. It. Goes.  

Or from the poetic mind of  Robert Frost: “In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”

Does our uniquely salvation-oriented culture believe so deeply that at judgment all our sins will be washed away, Christ having been made flesh to save those predestined for heaven?  

I’m not sure if I’ll get in, but fingers crossed.

Despite all the immigration and melting-potting of America, do we still live the subconscious lives of Puritans?  

These amazing founders — men and women (look up Anne Hutchinson, early New England trouble-maker) — truly believed that some had been saved, some had been damned, and absolutely nothing anyone did on this earth could make the slightest bit of difference.  They despised the Catholic notion of confession and penance.

All we have, all we can know, is the time God created on earth, a pre-planned, teleological narrative that unfolded according to His will and bracketed by a sort of divine parentheses: Creation on the one end, and Revelation on the other.  

Our job, the Puritans believed, was to just screw up or be successful in the ways God intended.  They also believed he wouldn’t hesitate to send reminders if they went astray (think Indian attacks, earthquakes, hurricanes, illness &c.)

****Begin History Lesson, feel free to skip****

All this worked well until some people, ever eager to eat of that tree of knowledge, wanted to figure out who was saved and who was damned—to separate the wheat from the chaff.  Legend has it that in a moment of terrible despair, a mother threw her baby down a well and killed it because she knew if she managed this feat, she would have to be one of the damned and so could give up worrying about it all.  The Puritans really believed in all this.

To make a long story short, they came to think of some as “visible saints,” but then folks got worried as to whether being saved meant your kids would be saved (if not, that’s one heck of an inheritance tax).  Thus the halfway covenant and, in a curious way, the Salem Witch Trails and many other persecutions of witchcraft around New England in the late 1680s and early 1690s.

After this craziness, they realized things had gotten a bit out of control: and it seemed like the world had finally settled down a bit, England’s Glorious Revolution having brought an assuredly Protestant monarch to the thrown.  And they were on the cusp of a century of Catholic-hating warfare, primarily against France and Spain.  Many, many years of war—the poor, empressed as sailors, soldiers pushed to fight on an increasingly world-wide scale—the poor went off to battle—“cannon fodder”—as Linda Colley has called them.

Finally, Britain beat France in the Seven Years War (some of you may know it as the French and Indian War) and Britain now reigned supreme.  A world-wide empire, incubating for a couple centuries, had been born.  France lost, had their Revolution and later Napoleon; Britian lost thirteen of its American Colonies, had a bit of a crisis of conscious, and decided to ban the slave trade to help make themselves feel a bit more virtuous as they headed into the 19th century.  Folks sang Newton’s “Amazing Grace” and the sins they were relieved.

****End History Lesson****

Fast forward, and the United States keeps scratching its head about these rather bizarre religious forbearers: hence Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Miller’s The Crucible, etc.  (Perhaps now with Guantanamo we’ve decided to outsource these tricky moments.)

In the last few weeks, teaching Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian to eleventh graders, I struggled to explain how his amazingly violent narrative of creation, futile wandering upon a barren land, and death as the only means to salvation — how all of this wasn’t too far off as an allegory for Biblical history.

We see through some perversely rosy-eyed glasses when we teach about and think about things like creation, Noah’s Ark, the life of Jesus, etc.

Think about it: God starts out with a pretty stern response to Adam and Eve’s misstep:  casting them out of paradise and essentially saying it’s misery and pain and inexplicable suffering from here on out.

Think about the flood: God killed every living thing on the whole planet—out of what’s hard to think of as anything but pure spite.

Finally, he sent a child, and set it up so we would kill him.  That’s a somewhat warped way of providing salvation.  Joy to the world!  The Lord is Born!

All this is to say, we have a lot more to think about in terms of our priorities, our blindness and our continued tolerance for what should be unthinkable violence.

Whether you believe in Him or not, God took not one of his children that Friday, but twenty.  

Charlotte.
Daniel.
Olivia.
Josephine.
Ana.
Dylan.
Madeleine.
Catherine.
Chase.
Jesse.
James.
Grace.
Emilie.
Jack.
Noah.
Caroline.
Jessica.
Benjamin.
Avielle.
Allison.

If Jesus gets The Holy Roman Empire, St. Peter’s, St. Paul’s Cathedral, two holidays—Christmas and Easter—just to name a few tributes—what does it look like when we’ve been reminded twenty-fold as to how perversely we’ve gone astray?

I would propose as one first nano-scale step the disbanding the NRA, outlawing hand guns and anything more than flintlock muskets.  (That’s Constitutional Originalism to my mind.)

Let’s turn swords into ploughshares, as the saying goes.

Then we can pause and reflect on what to do next.  

President Obama said, “This is our first task – caring for our children.  It’s our first job.  If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right.  That is how, as a society, we will be judged.”

Our children.  Indeed, “for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.”

How will we adults be left behind?  I think of the Inferno.  So it goes.

Now that we’ve averted the fiscal cliff, our politicians have no more excuses.  On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: all of America’s guns melted as a grotesque sculpture to remind us of how horribly wrong we’ve been.

“We will be judged.”  So it goes.  So it goes.  So it goes.  

Until we make it stop.  No one else will.  Certainly not God.  So it goes.