Forgive My Grief

There already have been millions of words written and spoken about the shooting in Tuscon. Mostly, the words will be the same words as those used to try to explain Ft. Hood, or after the 1991 Luby’s rampage in Killeen, Texas, or, following a massacre at a McDonalds in San Diego in 1984, and after assassinations in Dallas, Memphis and Los Angeles in the 1960’s. The same words tried to put into context the shooting of President Ronald Reagan, who thankfully survived, by the son of weathy Republican parents, and of John Lennon, by a disturbed man, who had worshiped him as a Beatle. We have grasped and groped for language to understand and explain the incomprehensible. So often, we have lost track, or tried to forget, the times, places and number of dead – the 20 places of worship in the last decade or the 105 schools and colleges since 1969, from Columbine to Virginia Tech. These are just the shootings that shock our sensibilities because of the fame, or number, of the victims or their vulnerability. Having already been sufficiently numbed to the daily grind of death occurring in gang violence and domestic disputes, we save our words of penance and prayers for the end of violence, for the most overt and less common place acts. This is not to demean or trivialize the words that attempt to uplift the spirits of the bereaved or a mourning nation. They are the mantra and liturgy of our grief. They are necessary, insufficient, and heart wrenching. In their continuing repetition there is both comfort and conundrum. The words comfort us now, the conundrum promises we will be here again. Blame and more gun laws will not cure unspeakable loss. Perhaps it is valid to say that this is a cost of freedom that crazy people get to have guns. That view is hard to share as the destruction, loss and pain brought on by the freedom of the crazed, would not seem to outweigh the freedom formerly enjoyed by the deceased, the wounded or the traumatized. The answers are not so easy. Derangement takes many forms and as long as random gun violence has been an epidemic in this country, there is almost nothing about it that we understand. Not every shooter is obviously deranged. There may be no sure way to effectively screen out the mentally ill, criminally impulsive, and just plain mean people, from owning a gun. All we are left with is our freedom (such as it is when it appears that we are required to own a gun to protect our freedoms, even if we don't want a gun) and countless words of sorrow. The national moment of silence just led by the President and First Lady, and shared by millions of Americans, was solemn and poignant, a moment to think and pray without the necessity of words. As Rep. Gabrielle Gifford’s brother in law, astronaut Scott Kelly, said succinctly from space this morning, “We are better than this.”