Fake Emergencies And Real Tragedies

Don’t let the tragedy of inaction repeat itself

The horrific mass shooting in Aurora, Illinois is still on our minds. Our President declares an emergency but for the wrong reason. All within 24 hours of the Parkland Stoneman Douglas High School tragedy’s one year anniversary. Fast forward, a few days and our newspapers are deprioritizing the mass shooting story to cover other more stimulating events that draw in their readers. For example, a story of actor, Jussie Smollett, who manufactured a bullying attack on himself, is given more attention in the news. Something is wrong.

 

We want to believe that this sad state of affairs is fueled by misguided politics and a clickbait media. That our increasingly polarized political classes egged on by partisan media outlets in a hyper-efficient technology world, are to blame for the predicament that we find ourselves in. We are being corrupted from the outside is our response. It is always the easier answer to blame someone else, especially the other, for the moral corruption around us. To quickly stretch, the argument to even say that the end justifies the means.
 
We have no choice but to be partisan, to excuse incorrigible, bad behavior by our leaders, to allow for shoddy journalism and to refuse to listen to logic from those that disagree with our world view. We’re under attack, we’re being invaded and we have to protect our children. These are arguments that have been used before.
 
The problem lies elsewhere though. As the Spanish American historian and philosopher, George Santayana once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In our technology-obsessed, dopamine infused age; we’ve lost memory and, as a result, are condemned to repeat the same mistakes. It isn’t that we have forgotten the mass shootings that have come before Aurora from Parkland, and the Pittsburgh synagogue to Santa Fe High School, the Las Vegas shooting and the Orlando nightclub, to name but a few.
 
Many of us are reminded of them each time there’s another mass shooting. What we forget though is the narratives that get spun around each tragedy. These are narratives which obfuscate the facts and render us immobile when it comes to having meaningful responses. Let’s reopen the Parkland tragedy to explain resultant phenomena.
 
On a sunny afternoon a little more than a year ago, a perpetrator with a semi-automatic rifle walked into a Stoneman Douglas High School building and within six minutes and twenty seconds killed seventeen people injuring many more. In the wake of the shooting, a myriad of narratives of what happened and who was to blame unfolded. Emma Gonzalez, a student at the school led a protest where she famously said, “We call BS” on the apathy of politicians funded by the NRA. She was disparaged in social media with a doctored image that showed her tearing up the constitution with dark circles added under her eyes to make her look sinister.
Conservative pundits blamed the school administration, the assailant’s parents and their lack of Christian values. Others called the students who were protesting easy access to guns, crisis actors. Sinclair Broadcasting, made its local stations read a message on air stating that national broadcasters should not be trusted. Laura Ingraham of Fox News and NRA supporter denigrated David Hogg, one of the school survivors detracting from the real story.
 
The President blamed the students and neighbors for not noticing that the shooter was mentally disturbed. He also pointed his finger at the FBI for spending too much time on proving Russian collusion instead. Other politicians wove their own distortions. Senator Marco Rubio, who had taken copious amounts of cash from the NRA, commiserated with the students in a nationally televised town hall pledging to prevent children from buying rifles while still supporting a bill in Washington DC that was about to allow them to do so. The liberal politicians framed the issue squarely as access to guns one and used it as an opportunity to denigrate the NRA and take potshots at the gun laws across the country. Some even called for the Second Amendment to be repealed.
 
During this period, most companies responded with deafening silence. Tragedies were difficult for companies and few dared to take a stand as they risked alienating customers or inciting the wrath of the President. Dick’s Sporting Goods, one of the largest sporting goods and gun retailers, announced that it would stop selling assault rifles. However, they were more the exception than the norm.
 
The truth was in the eye of the beholder. Those that agreed with the NRA before the tragedy, continued to do so after it. Anti-gun advocates who were rigid in their views prior to the shooting only became more stubborn, absolute and obstinate in their points of view. Those who were in the middle didn’t know whom to believe and why. They retreated to passive disengagement on the gun control debate preferring not to engage in the subject, take a stand, and make their own voices heard. The horrific shooting of seventeen innocent people in Parkland was seen, and explained, through so many different lenses, and subject to much partisan spin, that no one narrative prevailed.
 
As a result, two tragedies took place - the horrific shooting itself and a second where the truth did not prevail, a tragedy of inaction. In the second, instead of being moved to action, many of us numbed ourselves to all the noise. We retreated to own safe worlds.
 
Returning to today, the speed with which the Aurora tragedy is moving off the headlines, shouldn’t be the least bit surprising. Behind the scenes, the same behavior, by those on the left and the right is repeating itself. It is behavior that doesn’t get talked about, that is only visible across the arc of time but causes more damage to our society than any of us are willing to admit or appreciate. It is the damage that allows for all the other mass shootings that followed in 2018 and leading up to the Aurora shooting.
 
It allows us to call border wall disputes national emergencies when many more people are dying with untold, ongoing suffering for their friends and families in communities across the country in the real emergency. And worst of all, this tragedy of inaction doesn’t allow us to heal, to fix what is broken in our society and to do more to protect our children, our friends, our neighbors, and our co-workers. We only realize that with hindsight.
 
We live in an unusual time. It is on us to learn from the mistakes of the past - not just about what allows tragedies to happen but what enables them to happen again and again. It is the Molotov cocktail of partisan politics, viewership hungry media and hyper-efficient technology that confuses and immobilizes most of us allowing dual tragedies to happen - tragic deaths and human inaction. We must remember the past so that it stops repeating again and again. We must not let the tragedy of inaction repeat itself either. We owe this to our children.