No Place?

“There is no place for this kind of violence in America.” 

President Biden, July 14, 2024

One day after a relatively unknown, solitary gunman came within inches of assassinating a former president campaigning for reelection,  our current President expressed what many Americans were thinking. I believe he meant what he said. Unsurprisingly that sentiment has been echoed, often verbatim,  in the litany of amens  offered by nearly every politician and news commentator who managed to grab a few seconds of air time in the wake of the shooting.  And why not?  Don’t these words—words ringing of Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela—don’t they hold a sacred place in our national ethos? They certainly do for me. But they ring hollow when uttered as often as we now find ourselves doing.  It is not only because they sound as pro forma  in contemporary speech as “I’m sorry for your loss.”  They appear empty of meaning for the simple reason that they don’t express anything that bears any resemblance to reality, at least not the reality of life in these United States.  To put it more bluntly, they just aren’t true about this place or about we who call this place our very own.

“There is no place for this kind of violence in America.” 

Now I’m not suggesting in any way that President Biden was insincere in offering this statement.  Nor do I think he was grandstanding before a television audience who wondered how he would address the near-killing of his rival for the presidency.  He gave voice to an ideal that every politician is quick to intone following any of the calm-disrupting, peace-violating events that so punctuate our social existence, from school shootings to campus protests to urban riots.  In saying it out loud for many ears to hear, he was likely hoping to express both his outrage over such a violation of trust and order and his idealism for the country and the people he so loves.  Who among us doesn’t stand with him in anger and hope?  Who among us holds back in repeating this "no place…” mantra of modern American life.  It reminds me of a young Kansas girl chanting "there’s no place like home” as she clicked the heels of those ruby red slippers granting her a return ticket to this side of the rainbow.  But just as Dorothy, in waking, discovered that life in the real world was no longer as c0lorful and magical as it had been during her sojourn in Oz, so we must wake up to the fact that violence not only has a place in America, our country has never long endured without it.

I say this not as a war monger, gun owner, or closet vigilante. Rather I come to this conclusion as the only reasonable take-away from studying our long and contentious existence, where violence jumps out at almost every turn of our history’s pages. Were we not born in the violence of colonists carving out settlements through strife with indigenous peoples that took the lives of uncountable men, women and children on both sides?  Those scars continue to fester for many 0f us who have been the beneficiaries of this violence which stretched across forest and prairie from sea to shining sea. And hasn’t our great Republic been built on the violence of slavery that a Civil War, Jim Crow discrimination, lynchings, segregation, and both genuine and duplicitous Civil Rights initiatives have tried to undo?  So many blood-stained reminders of our house divided continue to keep us wary and mistrustful of each other.  No generation of Americans, from the first immigrants to those whose independence earned them the right to call themselves citizens, has ever escaped the violence of war or belligerence of one kind or another.  In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a single year in our history in which violence didn’t erupt somewhere in this land, bringing with it death, injury, and the destruction of property, each setting in motion consequences that have not only influenced subsequent events but shaped the values upon which our political and social lives have been constructed.*

There is no place for this kind of violence….really?  Whom are we kidding?  Violence seems to be in our DNA. Why it is so endemic to Americans I can’t say I understand.  But we dare not pretend it away  or ignore its continuing impact on who we are. Not being an authority on the history of other countries, I don’t have much with which to compare what has and keeps happening here. But my sense of human nature tells me that the violent strain we demonstrate is not unique to America but can be found almost everywhere when examined with a close critical eye. But here in this land of our greatest devotion…this “homeland” as it came to be called post 9-11…violence, when it occurs, is never that much of a surprise. It seems to be in the air we breath and the language we use. Even our beloved pastime, football, is hard to describe without terms evoking the violence of warfare. “Hit, blitz, strike, sack, sudden death, suicide squads” and, everyone’s favorite game changer, “the bomb.” So when politicians implore their followers with pumped fists, call upon them to “fight” or to put their opponent “in the crosshairs,” the imagery finds widespread resonance with those who understand the violence of this place.

As much as I abhor our violent character, I’m really put off by  our dishonesty in talking about it.   We can gravely utter the placebo that  there is “no place for this kind of violence” while at the same time promoting and enjoying uncensored violence in our speech and entertainments. Our former days when civil discourse was expected by those in the public eye seem to have given way to unfiltered outbursts of rage, whether in political address, congressional hearings, or in the  open smorgasbord of media outlets that serve and suit any ideological persuasion upon which we may take an occasional bite or gorge ourselves round the clock.  What may be most concerning of all, in my judgment, is our insatiable appetite for the violence of movies and video games that appeal both to our voyeurism in witnessing an exciting kill or in practicing our digital skills in mowing down all manner of assailants.  Admittedly it must be a lot of fun given the number of people (boys of various ages mostly I suspect) who get their kicks doing it.  But what is it telling them about life, or preparing them to do once they get outside their game cubicles? And what should we make of the uptick in the number of pugilistic sports now bringing in big ratings and gambling revenues from so many people watching men and women brutalize each other in an almost no-holds-barred cage match?  No place for this kind of violence…?  If our treasure really is where our heart is, as one whom many regard as the ultimate authority on peace once said, then the bottom line of where we spend our time and money says it all about us right now.  Our heart—collectively at least—is really into violence.

Should we, then, ever feign surprise or outrage when people, even young people, act out violently towards their classmates, their teachers, their colleagues, their neighbors or the “not like me” folks they fear? Should we ever think politicians, particularly those who seem to revel in incendiary language in fomenting group allegiance, might somehow be exempt from violence directed at themselves? There aren’t enough secret service agents to guarantee such immunity. And when we proclaim that there can be no place for  this kind of violence in America, do we mean any and every kind of violence?  Or are we really saying that there should be no place for your  kind of violence, even though mine  is legitimate and justifiable?  I sometimes think that is the real intent of our words, as we express our sympathy for the latest set of victims, and pledge to change the rules about the weapons  du jour  that we will now agree to permit or restrict, at least until the next inevitable killing crisis provokes us to act.  For decades now it seems that we have been engaged in a zero sum game.  But when  the cards we are dealt all wear a death’s head,  no one ultimately wins—not even the house.

I wake up each day realizing how great is the distance from the spirit of those folk troubadours of my youth who called us to “study war no more,” as we “lay down our swords and shields.” That refrains seems no longer to be in the air.  Now we come out in force to rally around issues that justify violence for us against some evil “other” of which we’d like to be rid, or in protesting the genocide of some while calling for the genocide of another. It makes me doubt that we will ever be able to understand and own Jesus’ warning that “those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” Perhaps in view of recent events, we should give it another listen, and even better, give it a more serious try.

There is no place for this kind of violence in America. If only that were true.  Without our honest confession of our addictions to the violence of our words, our fantasies, and our conduct, this land, this America, will continue to be a PLACE where the worst angels of our nature are free to wreck havoc on us all.  And if we continue to choose to live in THAT PLACE we most assuredly will guarantee that we will die in THAT PLACE, the very place of our making.

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*To gain a sobering appreciation for the violence of our history I recommend you look at these two entries in Wikipedia: “List of Conflicts in the United States” and “Timeline of United States Military Operations.” The hundreds of listings of violence are a corrective to anyone thinking that peace and unity, rather than strife and violence, have been normative throughout our country’s political and cultural existence.

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