”The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good, because otherwise who would care?” — V. M. Varga from the TV show Fargo
I collapsed in the driveway as I felt a stinging pain rocket up my leg. I was six. I suffered what was the first of too many ankle sprains to count during my underwhelming adolescent athletic career. As I fell to the ground, I skinned my knee on the pavement, saw the blood coating the cement in front of me, and began to wail. My mother ran out to grab me, took me inside, patched me up, and ensured that I still made it to my little league baseball game that weekend. America’s pastime has a way of healing wounds, but now, it serves as the site of this week’s American tragedy. That is, until the next one wipes Steve Scalise and the other victims off the front pages.
I grew up in an America that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. Perhaps it never did. The one we inhabited just a couple of years ago feels like a distant memory, let alone the world housing that boy alone in his driveway, crumpled in a heap of agony—certain that the blood pouring out of his knee would continue into infinity. Today I feel very much like that fragile child, but the blood is metaphorical, and anguish emanating from my soul has taken its place.
A sitting congressman was shot and remains in critical condition—a congressman who once referred to himself as “David Duke (the former Grand Wizard of the KKK) without the baggage.” Three others were shot as well, including two capitol policeman who were hit by gunfire, but remained undeterred in their mission to help those in desperate need of it. As inspiring as Crystal Griner’s and David Bailey’s actions were, the fact that the conditions we tolerate necessitated their heroism to stop an awful situation from becoming worse obscures the silver linings hidden in this uniquely American tragedy.
We have nearly as many guns as we do people in this country. This fact is not wholly exclusive to America—as countries like Switzerland, Canada and Sweden are teeming with firearms—yet they do not experience and tolerate the rote horror that our laws and culture enable. Japan and Germany play just as violent, if not more violent videogames, yet they do not obsess over their impact on the nation’s collective psyche like we do. We have acceded to a patronage relationship with bloodshed. American exceptionalism is a sword that cuts both ways.
We seem to be at a breaking point in the American experiment, with all sides determined to drive it down into their own custom-made ditches. The amorphousness of “winning” has overtaken the certainty of reality.
Donald Trump did not impose this cult of selfishness perpetuated in some way by every single American. He is simply the logical conclusion of our culture of greed. The result of a country of Israelites, sitting at the base of Mount Sinai, worshipping a golden calf. We speak about how much aid to cut from our most needy in budgetary terms. Human lives that can be added or subtracted in the service of reaching an arbitrary financial goal. A goal that always—no matter which party is in power—results in more for the super-rich and less for everyone else.
We divide ourselves along a fictitious 50-50 partisan split while 20% of our citizens own over 80% of American wealth. Demagogues aren’t the problem. Their demagogues are the problem. Our only responsibilities are to ourselves and our tribe, and reality is the victim in this exchange. The built-in divisiveness housing us in our invisible partisan cages is what enables hucksters like Sean Hannity to not even wait before the blood has dried before descending upon the site of a tragedy to issue a completely unrelated demand: that the special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice to investigate the president for obstruction of justice be fired by the president. The simplicity with which we can describe our modern contradictions is utterly poetic.
The Republican Party is trying to pass a wildly unpopular health care bill in secret. They are doing this because as one senior Senate GOP aide said, “we aren’t stupid.” This bill will kill people. People like my mother, who would eventually succumb to the seemingly infinite power of cancer. And for what? Because the Republicans must “win.” Even if victory means the loss of life. A winning campaign paid for by the blood of the innocent is still a winning campaign. The costs of reality have little value on the D.C. chessboard because an overwhelming amount of time, money and energy has been invested in telling us that what we see either is not true, or is a nefarious plot to gain the upper hand on “us” by “them.” The next generation is literally being mortgaged in the service of maintaining this unreality.
New Analysis Finds Uninsured Rate for Kids Would Increase by 50% Under AHCA https://t.co/Ffjw7Eg6Ob
— Georgetown CCF (@GeorgetownCCF) June 14, 2017