Surprise

There is a cruelty to a certain kind of surprise.

If you have a friend who suffers from chronic pain and you ask them how they’re doing and they say “Ah, not great, the pain’s pretty bad today” and you reacted with surprise that they’re in pain, there’s a cruelty to that. Why are you surprised that your friend is in pain when you know that this has been and will continue to be an ongoing part of their life? To your friend, a reaction of surprise indicates that you either haven’t taken seriously that their pain is chronic (that it’s not something you’ve given much thought to or that it’s so unimportant you’ve forgotten) or you’re surprised it’s affecting them as much as it is, which indicates a lack of empathy or interest in understanding their experience. Regardless of what’s going on, reacting with surprise at things you already know and understand can be cruel in its naivete – why are you reacting to something as if it’s new information when you were already taught it many times before?

There is a cruelty to the collective media response to mass shootings. It is cruel to say you are shocked and baffled that such a thing could happen in the United States. It is cruel to think that the world today is meaningfully different from the world a week ago, that we weren’t already living in a world where at any moment someone could walk into a school and gun down children. It is cruel to go through the motions and say “We can’t normalize this!” when it is normal and to pretend otherwise is to isolate, diminish, and erase the people who live in this reality day in and day out.

Police refusing to enter a dangerous situation and enabling people to be slaughtered as a result is normal. Random citizens owning assault rifles and going into public places, including schools, and murdering indiscriminately is normal. Mass shootings being followed up by political impotency and calls for more voting and more excuses is normal. None of this should be normal, but it is, and pretending otherwise is cruel.

We cannot react like babes in the woods every time a predictable and inevitable atrocity happens. We cannot respond as if we are just too overwhelmed and staggered by the grief and horror to know what to do. It is for the families and loved ones of the people murdered to be staggered and overwhelmed, it is for us to act and remain clear eyed about the forces and systems that enable this to happen time and again. Looking for someone to lead us is the instinct of a child or a person so house broken they cannot let their own moral compass guide them. We do not need a politician or talk show host or public figure to give us permission or guidance for how to react to children being killed while police prevent parents from trying to save them.

This is not a complicated or nuanced situation in its moral calculus or in its material consequence. The complexity and nuance is in how we build the power necessary to make the changes we know are necessary. But it is simple to identify that the people in power are not doing what is needed, nor have they for decades. There is no need to make excuses for why the Democratic leadership would campaign to elect a pro-gun candidate to office (Representative Cuellar) over an anti-gun challenger (Jessica Cisneros). There is no need for narratives that prioritize a good vs evil political story over the plain material reality: Neither party, when holding full control of all branches of government, has acted to address gun violence and the proliferation of arms within the United States. Period. There is no need to try and square this with the words of people from either party, we only need to look at their actions to judge the situation and determine our response.

We live in a country that responds to children being murdered en masse with nothing but platitudes and finger pointing and Tweets from the president acting as if he is not the president of the United fucking States, acting as if he, the most powerful person on Earth, is impotent to act. The people in power can act, as evidenced by how quickly they united to move $40 billion of arms to Ukraine or to provide funding for increased security for Supreme Court justices after a single peaceful protest outside the home of Kavanaugh. The failure to address gun violence is not for lack of ability, it’s for lack of will. If we owe each other anything, if we bear any collective responsibility for the well being of our communities, then the absolute minimum we can do is not gaslight ourselves into thinking we don’t understand what’s happening or that these events are in any way shocking.

You are not shocked by mass shootings anymore and neither am I, nor should we be. They are normal. It is our job to accept that reality and work to change it.