gun control – Landing

Wind

June 12, 2016

Maybe you did not go to church because God lets crazy people shoot fifty strangers. I have not been going because God has ruined my life in other ways.

I walked into a church, a church where no one knew me, so maybe I would feel different, and an usher told me not to sit down because they were in the middle of reading the lesson. Wouldn’t it be much less disruptive to let me sit down than to tell me not to? What kind of person tells people not to sit in church? It wasn’t even the gospel. I was going to leave.

I wasn’t going to leave.

The lesson was about Ahab and Jezebel and a garden, a long lesson no one would want to talk about. I had to confirm it was really about Ahab, and I didn’t just have Ahab on my mind, the way I always do when I am downtown, in Melville’s neighborhood.

I sat. On one side of me, a woman who also was doing the whole thing, on the other, a woman who didn’t seem to know the drill. In front of us, three people who were Asian and just sat. It’s a funny phenomena, here where churches are tourist attractions, so that church, and the big cathedrals, are both holy places and places people come to see holiness played out. Through the whole service, there was a group of people in back taking photos. The woman next to me was texting someone.

This is all fine, it’s just weird.

Why were they there? We were animals in the zoo? In Asia, we would go to temples and take photos and not pray. Why was I there? To feel better for a minute, to feel not trapped in being angry the church I had joined, that no one might notice I was gone, so petty. Or I was there because I had several times hit this church after a bad day, it was on my way home from my Manhattan job, and the side chapel is small and sweet and quiet, and the subway is right there, and it was bigger and more fancy town than my church.

The priest had to talk about the shooting. I had heard something bad in a minute of NPR. I am in full self-protection/healing mode, which means No politics, but still I had heard that. I hadn’t heard it was a gay club.

I’ve spent some small happy times in gay bars for the dancing or the singing. The reason a gay bar feels so safe is that I figure everyone there is at peace with him/herself, they had to work harder to become so, and they value tolerance more than other people, so I feel safe.

Like people should feel safe at church, but then, it’s been a year since another lunatic shot up a Bible study.

I got communion. I got to sing. I didn’t feel particularly better about God, in a narrative sense, but I did feel that things that hurt me were like pieces of armor or extra bones that I could shake off, rather than a part of my structure.

I was not feeling brave enough to go to doughnut time afterward.

I went down to the water. I am preparing this costume for the Mermaid Parade next week. I am going as The Sea. So it was research. What is water? It has four or five inch ruffles of white foam from the wind and the passings of the jet skis and the ferry and the Statue cruise boats, which could be rendered with white acrylic paint and dabbing with a bristly brush. I was watching the happy painter earlier in the week. His technique could help me.

Monday I went to the East River and looked out at it for a while. My anxiety brain cloud has been reactivating ferociously, so I was looking at the East River and waiting for my good drugs to take effect. It was windy that day, walking out on a pier to be surrounded by water.

It was so windy today, I lay back on a bench, with the Statue of Liberty to my left, and even though I was holding it down, the wind was so strong, my skirt a sail, it blew up and I was glad I wore clean and uninteresting underwear.

I don’t think a single soul noticed.

The priest said we can’t let people who use freedom another way take it away from us. What freedom really means. FDR’s four freedoms: of speech, of worship, from want, from fear. Why does God let people do that, frighten us for their freedom. Why do we let them?

I am used to wind. I don’t know why now I need water, water does scare me, big quantities of it seem like too much, for this midwesterner. It never scares me as much as buildings too big or too much sky, though. I was always a good swimmer, in my dreams, I can always breathe underwater.

Image: “Evening Wind,” Edward Hopper, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The War

December 15, 2012

All my growing-up years, guns were in movies and (I imagined) in the hands of people less interesting and educated than me. I had no idea why anyone would want or need a gun.

I moved to the city eleven years ago. I remember hearing someone got shot in the parking lot of the drugstore where I usually shop, the parking lot right by where I often have dinner with friends. Most of those shootings were personal, like most shootings in the city are personal. It’s possible to get in the way, but most of the time, people in the city who shoot at you have a reason. I find that comforting.

The difference between my city living (moved here by choice) and my students’ city living is that I estimate half of them have lost a friend of family member to gun violence. Half. Half of the sixteen-year-olds I teach have gone to funerals where the deceased was shot to death. I still find that hard to believe. I haven’t lost anyone. Except a student.

I have friends who have guns and go hunting. I understand the desire to participate in the old “Lion King” circle of life, hunting and killing and eating, but I don’t understand why you would actually do that when not killing works just fine. I asked to hold my friend’s shotgun once. It was heavy.

Two of my students were shot. One killed, one paralyzed. That was maybe four years ago. Guns were real to me then. If guns were harder to get, things might be different.

Rumor has it that my students who were absent this week got caught with a gun. Two of my solid students– one a joker, one a quiet guy. Smart enough kids, active in sports, rarely in trouble. They’re in jail. Maybe they sold drugs, maybe they robbed someone, maybe not. I don’t know.

I am always so numb with exhaustion by this point in the school year that I feel very little. After I learned my students were in jail, which I tried to muster up some energy to process, I heard about the Connecticut stuff. How many gun incidents could I get upset about in one day?

I read recently that the less privileged you are, the more likely you are to limit your violence to your own community. Is lack of power so depressing that people don’t have the energy to turn their anger outward? It amazes me that with wealthy suburbs accessible all around, when people in the impoverished parts of the city get angry, they use their guns on each other. Even when we’ve had riots, poor people started where they were and destroyed that.

Of course, I don’t wish they’d take their guns to my parents’ neighborhood. But it amazes me that poverty brainwashes people that they turn their anger on themselves, time and again, with guns, with drugs. Capitalism is good at doing that, I guess, convincing people that if you don’t have money, you are an embarrassment.

What I do wish is that the anger in poor communities could be channeled into demanding jobs and services and better schools and health care and parks and policing and grocery stores with the same sense of entitlement shown by people who grew up with money, who know no one is ever going to call them “entitled.” “Entitled” is a word for people you look down on.

It makes sense to me that white men are more likely to be alienated. For many years in our culture, they were barely allowed to have emotions at all.

During the last few years, public schools have cut back on mental health services, and this is an outrageously irresponsible move. If kids don’t get mental health care at school, small problems easily erupt into bigger ones. I think anyone who shoots another person is mentally ill, by definition, but that’s just me.

And, yes, guns should be more reasonably regulated: buying and selling records and insurance required, plus federal background checks for everyone, at every point of sale.

Americans love violence, they love shooting each other, they love guns. Europeans took hundreds of years to lose their lust for killing each other. They went at it large-scale for generations, until World War II finally kicked them down so hard they quit for a breather. Although we aren’t close to that point, it isn’t the wild west around here, either. We have grown a little.

After more gun violence, we go back to our own trenches, to teach how to tend anger. To keep being polite. And like people throughout history, with irrational optimism, we pray for peace.