I'm not really sure what or how to say what I've been thinking this past week. I’ve been thinking a lot about a lot of things.. What happened in Orlando was what can only be referred to as an expected surprise. That is, we didn’t know where, who, when, or why, but let's be honest and admit we were all resigned to the fact that there WOULD be another mass shooting. It was just a matter of time. According to numbers we often do not have to wait long at all for one of these catastrophes to occur.
It leads us to the benign and redundant questions…
Why does this happen here?
Why or what is it about the people within these borders and violence?
Why can’t we do a damn thing about it?
Now, I’m a history teacher and valor-filled violence is the title track to our nation’s melodious mayhem. We are 240 year riot in progress from indigenous interaction (colonization), The Civil War and slavery, to Jim Crow. The Indian Wars to reservations and Indian Removal, the Dawes Act, and later land runs. Violence is a big part of our story.
The framing of these events, of course, is everything to our perception of good and bad violence. History lets us clean it up, but a better understanding of all elements would give us a better chance at knowing what to do today.
Our history is multi sided and we MUST start acting that way.
Of course, I spent most of my life blind to the other half of that history. As a white male, my rights have NEVER been in danger in this country. I haven’t had to fight for too many of mine. From my comfortable privileged positions I can always frame a furtherance of liberty and freedom as “just” and “benevolent”. I can even lament the awful tragedy of “it's about time”, not considering the “why” behind why it took so long…
This attitude should rightly be seen as patronizing and demeaning. I now know not to see things this way. As if a government made of white guys needs to tell women, POC, the LGBTQA community, and religious minorities they can have rights!?!? The audacity in the belief this government “gave” those constituencies rights is ignorant at best, or at worst, a further protraction of White Hegemonic Power and control, cloaked in the praises of “Freedom and “liberty”. Being honest about this can start the healing…
This is critical because, as Hasan Minhaj pointed out so eloquently (clip here whole speech is worth watching tho) “Civil Rights are an all or nothing thing.” And as Obama noted in his 2004 Address to the Democratic National Convention (another speech you should watch if you haven’t already) “We are the United States of America” and if one person’s rights are violated, or one person is hurting unnecessarily, “...that hurts me too.”
This attack was on American values. This attack was targeted towards the LGBTQA community. And as long as elements of our culture attempt to degrade and belittle the experience of their fellow citizens, events like this will continue.
There have been remarkable outpourings of support, condolences, and raw emotion for and within the LGBTQA community. I read account after account, and reaction after reaction and cried (I can be a crier). History is valuable and knowing all our brothers and sisters history is by far, the best way to combat the fear and hatred that is allowed to fester.
If we continue to allow this blindness to continue, violence and misunderstanding will always be with us. We will never rid the world of evil, no matter what a pundit or politician says. But we can minimize it and make it hard to thrive. Fire needs fuel, Humans need food, water, and oxygen, hate needs ignorance fear. Let’s starve it out…
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