Disasters are seen as something that occurs naturally, something completely out of our control. Which is true, except we can control what happens after the disaster. We just choose not to. Society tends to look away when people are living in crisis. For a while it is highlighted as the main story; the coverage is everywhere until it isn’t. Todays news is tomorrow’s history.
No one ever talks about the disasters that we can prevent from happening. Gun violence has always been an issue in America. Usually more in urban areas, where many minorities like Black and Latino communities live in. But no one cares. However, there was one event that made the whole country stop and think “why is this happening?” That event was Sandy Hook in 2012 when a gunman shot 20+ children and some teachers at an elementary school. Those kids died that day because a 20-year-old was able to get ahold of a gun. You would think after children died that we would start looking into gun reform. We didn’t. Years went by and more and more school shootings happened. Six years later, and nothing has changed. After the Parkland High School shooting in Florida on February 14, 2018, students decided it was time for a change. Gun violence is ruining their life and everyone around them. It’s not always schools who experience this horror, sometimes it’s nightclubs, concerts, churches, movie theaters and restaurants. However, school shootings are the ones who get more news coverage because they are the ones that frequently happen. Whenever a disaster hits, everyone is in a state of shock.
People can’t control what happens while they’re in shock. You can control yourself. You’re so scared that you stop letting yourself think, so you can escape what is happening right in front of you. In the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein we start to see how shock has affected society. According to Revise Sociology, Klein argues that neo-liberal economic policies have been pushed through following ‘shocks’ — typically either natural disasters or wars ore oppressive state apparatuses. She also says that these policies work against the interests of the majority because they transfer wealth and power from the people to the global corporate elite, thus why elites need to implement these policies of in times of shock following disaster. The NRA (National Rifle Association) benefits a huge amount from these outcomes. The NRA doesn’t care who gets hurt as long as people keep buying guns. The NRA also donated money to people in power, like our fellow politicians and people in office. American citizens support the NRA because it is in their right to own a gun, according to the 2nd amendment. However, we do not live in the same environment we did back when the Bill of Rights was made. We don’t need guns to protect ourselves from animals or intruders. We have police, we have other ways of protecting ourselves.
Yet we have failed to protect our communities. Families will never get to hold their children and loved ones because a teenager was mad a girl rejected him, hated black people, hated everyone in their school or hated everyone in general. Killing others for their own benefit causes more problems for the people who they left behind to pick up the pieces. Naomi Klein talks about a “clean-slate” after a disaster, “Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what was not destroyed; they want to reaffirm their relatedness to the places that formed them.” A clean-slate means you can start all over, because the disaster helped you. It’s helping you by giving you a second chance. However, families after school shootings don’t want a clean-slate. They want their children back. Whether their child was killed or has changed due to that day. A clean-slate in this situation isn’t a good thing. Parents don’t want to start all over, they don’t want to forget their child. What parents want is a safe place where their kids don’t have to fear for their lives.
Living in a state of fear causes us to give in to disaster itself. We allow disaster to be the source of our fear, the source of our lives. Klein states why disaster is the reason why we advance as a society, “I discovered that the idea of exploiting crisis and disaster has been the modus operandi of Milton Friedman’s movement from the very beginning — this fundamentalist form of capitalism has always needed disasters to advance.” Without disaster, there wouldn’t be big organizations like FEMA, or American Red Cross, or anything that helps people in a time of crisis. According to The Stanger, People shouldn’t donate their money to Red Cross because only a portion goes to the victims of the disaster and the rest goes to internal expenses; usually around $125 million. With all the coverage it gets around the world, people feel pity and donate whatever they can. More and more money go to organizations who like to profit from people dealing in crisis. With disaster we also get new projects to help rebuild what was destroyed. We try to make it better, we try to use the “clean-slate” it gave us to our own benefit. But, school shootings don’t get donations or “clean-slates”. They get media coverage, then days later people forget until another one happens.
What’s ironic is that our government is focused on problems that don’t directly affect us. They like to be involved with other countries while their own citizens need help. In the Shock Doctrine, Klein addresses this issue, “United States homeland in perpetuity while eliminating all “evil” abroad.” The United States will live on forever while fighting for everyone who doesn’t have the ability to fight for themselves. America believes it’s perfect and that we are the #1 country in the world. Are we? We’re not. As a country, we need to try to fix the problems within our borders instead providing aid to others. We need help keeping our schools safe and protecting the children; as well as our civilians who are also attacked during their day just because of how they look or what they believe in. While they are killing the “evil” abroad, the innocent is being killed at home.
The sad truth is that it will never change. It’s hard to say but people are obsessed with disaster. We wait for the next school shooting because we know it will happen. It’ll keep happening until something changes. Shock gives us the ability to move forward, so where will this shock lead us?
