Healing America’s Narratives: Guns, Money, & Violence
[Part of our ongoing exploration Healing America’s Narratives: The Feminine, the Masculine, & Our Collective National Shadow, this essay focuses on the roles violence and greed play in our collective Shadow. The book is available here.]
The underlying premise in Healing America’s Narratives is that the United States we know in the third decade of the 21st century is inevitable. Viewed through the lenses of history and psychology, our violence, anxiety, depression, addiction, wealth disparity, bigotry, greed, excess, and our individual and collective trauma are anything but surprising.
America remains an experiment:
“We were conceived through the fertilization of ideas that gave voice to some and subjugated others. We were born through a bloodbath that pitted Brit against Brit on land stolen from indigenous peoples and developed by kidnapped Africans. We were raised on enslavement, land and property theft, massacre, betrayal, and peasant labor. We were reborn in an attempt to maintain the experiment through an anything-but-civil bloodbath with ourselves, from which we have yet to fully recover. And we were reborn yet again as a financial and military superpower as the result of a global bloodbath.
“We regularly perpetrate and perpetuate violence against others while refusing to acknowledge and address in any effective way the everyday violence we commit against ourselves…. Not yet 250 years old, we’re lost in a national adolescence, thinking we’re invincible and immortal — despite clear evidence that we are neither. Not only have we not recovered from our bloodbaths of birth and rebirth in any whole, integrated sense, we continue to choose to bathe ourselves and others in blood, literally and metaphorically, because that is the normal we know.”¹
Killing each other with guns is part of a larger legacy.
An online search today for “mass shootings in the US” returned 34,800,000 results in 0.38 seconds. A similar search, for “shootings in the US,” took more time — 0.51 seconds — and returned 2,400,000,000 results. Let’s say those numbers out loud: thirty-four million, eight hundred thousand, and two billion, four hundred million.
We are divided in our views of guns, and we debate interpretations of the Second Amendment while we kill each other and gun sales make a lot of money for a few people. All of our children, in every school district in the country practice active shooter drills. Just in case.
I don’t pretend to have solution to this problem. But as long as there is a moat filled with lobbyists around the Capitol and the protected royalty within need to fund their reelection campaigns, we will continue to sling meaningless slogans and talking points about what the founders wanted, good guys with guns, thoughts and prayers, this has to stop, not one more, and the greatest country in the world. At what?
At violence? Perhaps, yes.
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- Healing America’s Narratives, 325–26.
