With Courage and Love in Our Hearts, My Friends, Brighter Days Are Ahead

As always, there are so many things to be grateful for this Thanksgiving and Christmas Season. Last week, turkey steaming, gravy and cranberry sauce spicing the wintery breezes with sweet luxury, the world felt almost sane again for a moment or two. But the homeless vet shivering on the median, college kids shooting each other at UNM over basketball, homophobia’s hideous violence, and hate speech disguised as “fact” in Florida caused sanity’s knees to buckle once again.

We wondered if politics could be any help at all in solving the massive problems we face, or if it was all just “a Barnum and Bailey world” after all and “as phony as it can be.” For a moment it felt as if we’d slipped through the looking glass and found ourselves not in a Wonderland but in Horrorscape of astonishing impotence.

We knew, of course, that fights at sporting events had caused stampedes and accidental deaths many times in other places, but that here altercations had usually ended up with just a knuckle sandwich or a bloody nose. But the heartbreaking stupidity of an actual gun fight on UNM’s campus made it clear to us once again that our country is down sick with the plague of guns, and that the virus of rage is armed to kill not to punch. Guns have become as indestructible and ever-present as sand in a tornado. UNM apparently has strong policies prohibiting firearms on campus. But policies can’t compete with a plague. What’s to be done about guns?

What would have happened at Club Q in the Colorado Springs last week when a brainwashed kid with a gun turned homophobia into a hemorrhagic seizure of rage, murdering five and wounding many more, if guns hadn’t become an epidemic, if they weren’t as common as germs infecting ignorance, hate and fear with homicidal potential? The devastating tragedy simply would not and could not have happened. A gun, and the ease of finding one, made it possible to commit such a deadly act of derangement. A gun gave a young person infected with bigotry an easy way to activate his hate. Without the gun, the hate would still be there, but the deaths would not.

Guns have become as common as hunger. And hunger is everywhere on our bitter cold and windy streets these days. Last week, just before Thanksgiving, a frighteningly thin and bedraggled man on a median held up a cardboard sign that said “Sorry. Homeless. Hungry. Anything helps. I’m a vet.” No one honked in the busy intersection when drivers slowed to give him a little help. At that particular moment, it seems, we all knew that “there but for the grace of God…”

It is a terrible and disgraceful truth that “on any given night” in our country more the 40,000 vets are homeless, hungry, and cold. Nearly 13% of the homeless adult population in America are veterans, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The National Coalition of Homeless Veterans figures approximately 12,700 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were on the streets even a dozen years ago, and the numbers have increased astronomically since. Many, if not all, homeless vets are victims of the debilitating trauma of violence — of witnessing, perpetrating, or suffering violence — which is destroying their lives. But it is the betrayal they feel from their government, and the country they served, that drives many over the edge.

Their plight — like the catastrophe of the plague of guns, like poverty itself, social injustice and violent crime, and the now the inevitability of calamitous climate change — has been drowned out by an American political culture that’s become a sick joke of triviality and irrelevance.

Take the bill that passed the Florida Legislature and was signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis last year. It’s called the Stop the W.O.K.E Act. “The state of Florida,” Gov. DeSantis boasted, after his reelection, “is the place where woke goes to die.” The law basically bars colleges and schools from mentioning racism and segregation as a part of American history. It’s a gag order aimed at restricting speech about what the governor calls the “pernicious” ideology of critical race theory. The theory sees racism as a “social construct” embedded systemically in American culture, not as merely a matter of individual bigotry. It’s key concepts have been put to use by feminists and the LBGTQ community. A federal judge in Florida blocked the anti-woke law in August claiming it was an affront to the First Amendment. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote “The State of Florida’s decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all. But the First Amendment does not permit the State of Florida to muzzle its university professors, impose its own orthodoxy of viewpoints, and cast us all into the dark.”

Commenting on the Judge Walker’s decision, NPR said the anti-woke law is “designed to prevent schools and workplaces from discussing racism. The bill prohibits schools and workplaces from any instruction that suggests that any individual, by virtue of their race, color, sex or origin, ‘bears responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress’ on account of acts of racism. The bill also forbids education and training that says individuals are ‘privileged or oppressed’ due to their race or sex,” NPR said.

This vile and ridiculous insult to the Constitution has one principal function over and above shielding white supremacy from analysis and criticism, and that’s to add to the circus of distraction, violence and trivialization that has come so close to cracking the sanity of our national culture and discourse. What could be more cynically mind-blowing than for Florida racists, homophobes and sexists to pass a bill forbidding criticism of racism, homophobia and sexism?

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, however, some of the cobwebs and poisonous varmints of recent years have been swept from the corners of the ceiling. With our families around us, we remembered gratefully that though we are a troubled and violent nation, an ever-larger majority of us have grown disgusted with the physical and intellectual brutality plaguing the mental health of our society. And we felt strangely hopeful that calmer and kinder times might lay ahead if we continued to riseup, let our revulsion be known, and gave our unstinting support to causes we believe in.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it