May 26
This is No Way to Live
What if we just said no to guns?
When I was a child in Ohio, my dad and his best friend took me out to a wildflower meadow to teach me how to shoot a gun.
At that time in my life, my room was bedazzled with rainbows. I spent my afternoons riding horses, twirling around that meadow, or dancing in front of my collection of stuffies. Everyone knew I was not a prime candidate for shooting. But my dad said that living in America meant knowing how to shoot a gun.
What surprises me today when I think back to that moment is not the cold steel, heavy and shaking in my sweaty small hands, nor the force of the weapon's kick-back that flung me onto a pile of clovers, but the way none of us questioned why any of us should need to know how to fire a gun.
Gun violence in America
Last week, the police knocked on my door at 4:15am after four pops woke us from sleep and ended a man's life in the alley behind my house — the alley where my children take out the trash and retrieve their soccer balls. Our local newspaper reported, coldly, that the victim was a 52-year old man. Victim.
This week, a mentally ill high school student shot dead 19 elementary school children and two adults in the United States of America — 21 more victims in a country that used to be considered a place of morality, a just place, a haven for anyone who needed a chance to thrive. This is the land my great grandparents gave up everything for, a land once filled with hopes and dreams.
Today, we are a collection of sick teenagers with guns and enough bullets to play out our delusions that our actions have no consequence. We can easily get within range of kids my son Nikko's age and with one click choose to end their dreams of being the next Messi. One dumb idea and we halt a teacher's ability to help a child learn to read, or live out their dreams. My neighbor told me that with just a driver's license, some cash, and a signature, she could buy a gun in five minutes.
It's not a new story that gun violence is again on the rise in America. We're killing ourselves thinking we're protecting ourselves. Another neighbor, an eighty year old woman, said she now wants a gun: an elderly woman wants to buy a gun to protect herself from other guns.
Americans appear to believe that our individual rights are all that matters.
However, your freedom must respect my freedom. The second your freedom infringes on mine, the concept of your freedom must be reimagined. We exist in a society. That means we exist with others — folks who are the same and different. You might not believe I should have the right to get an abortion as fiercely as I believe you should not have the right to have a gun. So what do we do about that?
We cannot expect politicians to truly fight for womens' rights or get rid of guns in the U.S. because the gun and pro-life (yes, we all see the irony, do you right leaning folks see it yet?) lobbyists own them. Not when only 52% of Americans want stricter gun laws. I cannot accept that gun rights advocates are truly evil, or that they want children to be killed by some weak gun toter's right to have a weapon. Yet this is the only message our leaders are sending us.
Learning from climate leaders
For years, scientists have understood that our leaders will not make hard choices that go against their voter base. If they won't be in power in four years, what's the point of working their asses off toward some goal that benefits three generations from now?
Climate activists and scientists know change swells from the ground up. Take Hawaii for instance. For Hawaiian culture to survive, the land must also thrive. While government leaders were enabling their sacred land to be trampled by over-tourism, selling out to the extractive tourism machine, community members took matters into their own hands to become a UN sustainability hub that must meet seventeen set goals by 2030 — one of them being sustainable tourism.
Now, Hawaiian leaders must ride the wave the people set forth. If they don't, they will be left out at sea. Today, Hawaii is the world's first massive tourism destination with the aim of being fully regenerative in scope.
What if the rest of Americans learned from this? What if we stopped expecting the people in power to do something about guns? What if instead we help our communities ourselves?
Could our communities become the safe havens our ancestors or parents imagined they would be? Sacramento activists traded gas money for guns. What if we traded food for guns? Jobs? What if we held monthly gatherings in our communities to find ways to look out for each other? My neighborhood is doing that. After the shooting, we're meeting to discuss how we can protect each other in clear tangible ways without guns. We're talking about adding more lights, and lookouts.
What if we actually educated youth about guns instead of just shoving them in front of video games or thinking You Tube will show them the way? What if we offered mental health services to kids who are struggling (and they are struggling, hard)? What if we made each person who bought a gun take a mental health class or participate in Story Exchanges with their communities? What if each of us found one thing to do for our community to help keep our kids, our parents, our neighbors safe?
If our government is not going to do it, if all they've got are hopes and prayers, then maybe we need to try.
It's on us now to show our kids that we are helping. When my son Kai talks about his despair over our climate crisis, I remind him that the smartest minds of our generation are working to secure his future, and that I have dropped everything to do my part to protect him. To ensure they have a future, we must do something everyday to protect their bodies, their minds, their lungs, their planet. And we must also remind them that while no one has fixed our gun problem in the US yet, and no one has fixed our global climate emergency, yet, someone will.
And if we all try, your efforts might actually help. When despair has kept me awake at night, the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing that I have to do one thing to try and make the world habitable for my kids. Some days that is writing to you. Some days, I write to or call my leaders. Some days I teach my university students. Some days, I go outside and plant my community garden, hoping that nourishing one hungry person might help.
I'm not deluded. I know I cannot alone make a difference, and that it takes systemic change. But when we all take part, that becomes a systemic tsunami that our leaders cannot ignore.
When I talked to my ten-year-old son about the Texas elementary school shooting, I asked him what he would do if a shooter came into his classroom. He started by telling me that his school felt like a jail and it would be very hard for someone to get in, or get to his class. He asked me what places on the planet don't have guns, then said we should move there, that we should pack up and take a chance just like my great grandparents did, and give up everything so our kids have the chance at a better life.
Then he gave me a hug and said he felt safe at school. I didn't tell him that I don't feel safe when he walks out that door. That every day, when he and his older brother set out for school, I kiss them goodbye and pray that they return home safely.
This is not a way to live. And we cannot accept this any longer.
What if we each commit to doing one thing every day to directly support our community — be that a school community, work, your street, your neighborhood? What would happen if we stopped accepting that we are simply victims in a soiled system? What would it look like if we stopped thinking that some document written over 200 years ago to free some of our ancestors from the bonds of British rule is the answer for us today? What if we actively worked toward the future we imagine for our kids?
Michele Bigley is an award-winning writer with bylines in the New York Times, Afar, Outside, Hidden Compass, Los Angeles Times and many more. She is writing a book about how taking her sons to meet people stewarding fragile ecosystems taught them how to nurture their community. Subscribe to her monthly newsletter Our Feet on the Ground here. Or sign up on Medium to follow her adventures.
Thanks toKate Green Tripp
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