San Bernardino, Sorkin and Something Better

The world doesn’t make sense today. It didn’t make sense yesterday, last week, or last year either. But we try to forget that. It’s easier to proceed from tragedy to tragedy with our heads in the sand, thirstily drinking what peace we can extract from life’s fire hose. It’s a comforting illusion, one that we tell ourselves we deserve; that sanity demands. But it’s a total lie.

This is my mindset as I walk down my own road of fury; my own unbridled anger at guns, gun owners, gun violence, gun culture, guns, guns, guns. But then I stop myself. Realizing that my rage is counterproductive, more divisive than conciliatory. We’re never going to win gun advocates over via hostile takeover. After all, they’re the ones with all the guns.

So my attitude is part of the problem too. Realizing this, I end up in the same position as everyone else: paralyzed by “woe is us.” That’s not good enough.

Yet, as the unfortunate pun tells us: there are no silver bullets to the gun problem that plagues this country (not ones I’m willing to hurl out in a trivial blog post, anyway).

So I’m/we’re stuck. As the utter frustration at the entrapment of our design sets in, I’m left searching for hope, for meaning, for poignancy. It’s not an exercise in convincing myself that things are okay — they aren’t. It’s an exercise in belief. Not a belief in the gods of religion, but belief in the divinity of persuasion.

Words matter. If there’s one thing I foolish believe with my whole heart, it’s that if we try hard enough we can find the words to bridge the gaps and make each other understand each other. Yes, this is blind devotion to an utterly unattainable belief; an impossible quest. But it’s a quest that’s absolutely worth pursuing. I’m more than willing to spend my life as the Fool, entangled in the never-ending Fool’s Errand.

As this Fool spent his afternoon stewing, taking in sobering detail after sobering detail of the San Bernardino tragedy, I ended up looking for different words to say to the people on the other side of this divide. As is so often the case, I ended up in the clutches of Aaron Sorkin, who unfailing sees the world more clearly, more hopefully than anyone I’ve ever come across. In scouring his ever-powerful prose for inspiration, I passed up dozens of on-point, but loaded commentary on gun control — nobody who didn’t want to hear this yesterday is going to listen today.

Instead, I found a perfect bit of dialogue from an old West Wing episode (“Take This Sabbath Day”):

Father Thomas Cavanaugh: “You remind me of the man that lived by the river. He heard a radio report that the river was going to rush up and flood the town, and that the all the residents should evacuate their homes. But the man said, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’ The waters rose up. A guy in a rowboat came along and he shouted, ‘Hey, hey you, you in there. The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back, ‘I’m religious. I pray. God loves me. God will save me.’ A helicopter was hovering overhead and a guy with a megaphone shouted, ‘Hey you, you down there. The town is flooding. Let me drop this ladder and I’ll take you to safety.’ But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and that God will take him to safety. Well… the man drowned. And standing at the gates of St. Peter he demanded an audience with God. ‘Lord,’ he said, ‘I’m a religious man, I pray, I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?’ God said, ‘I sent you a radio report, a helicopter and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?’”

It’s an allegory with a religious frame, but which is applicable far beyond religion. Dogma blinds us to stubborn inaction when all sorts of signals are urging us in the other direction. Crippling ourselves under the banner of a principle isn’t noble, it’s damning. Inaction is a choice. Digging our heels in is a choice. Ignoring the signals of our destruction is a catastrophe. A slow, bloody catastrophe that plays itself out one BREAKING NEWS tweet at a time, month after month, year after year. We’re killing ourselves. We’re killing humans, humanity and all.

We can choose to let that reality bog us down; doom us to paralysis and navel-gazing. Or maybe we can learn something from another Sorkin quote on tragedies, heroes and better worlds (from West Wing: “20 Hours in America”):

President Josiah Bartlet: More than any time in recent history, America’s destiny is not of our own choosing. We did not seek nor did we provoke an assault on our freedom and our way of life. We did not expect nor did we invite a confrontation with evil. Yet the true measure of a people’s strength is how they rise to master that moment when it does arrive. 44 people were killed a couple of hours ago at Kennison State University. Three swimmers from the men’s team were killed and two others are in critical condition. When, after having heard the explosion from their practice facility, they ran into the fire to help get people out. Ran *in* to the fire. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels tonight. They’re our students and our teachers and our parents and our friends. The streets of heaven are too crowded with angels, but every time we think we have measured our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and we’re reminded that that capacity may well be limitless. This is a time for American heroes. We will do what is hard. We will achieve what is great. This is a time for American heroes and we reach for the stars. God bless their memory, God bless you and God bless the United States of America. Thank you.

It’s a lovely sentiment, but one that we, in reality, have yet to earn. How will we respond to San Bernardino in a way that is running into, instead of away from the fire? How will we rediscover our humanity? Our humility? And our obligation to lives that might yet be saved? How will we take the leap to do something different?

Words alone aren’t the answer, but I sure as hell hope they can be a start. So let’s keep talking. Angry, sad or otherwise.

Update 12/3: The impetus for this post was the San Bernardino attack as it was understood the day it happened (December 4). A day later, more details and nuance on the attack are coming to light. Suddenly there’s a question of whether there was a terrorist influence on the San Bernardino attackers (don’t get wrapped up in definitions of “terrorist” here — just parroting mainstream media). That’s an important nuance. One that will likely take mainstream discourse in a totally separate direction (away from gun violence generally to terrorism specifically). That’s fine — but it doesn’t ultimately change anything that I wrote. Violence, whatever its motivation, is an endemic problem that continues to spiral out of control. There’s something fundamentally broken in our society —a gap that can only be bridged by less division and more understanding. The details might change, but the facts remain: there’s a piece of us that’s broken and that piece has jagged edges. That needs fixing.