It’s morning here in America.
And there is mourning here in America.
It’s the beginning of a new day after yet another massacre with guns.
Today (like so many other days) will be filled with new memorial hashtags, with a parade of incendiary panels of television pundits, with a flood of flowery public offerings of “thoughts and prayers” from opportunistic politicians—and lots and lots of premature funeral plans by devastated loved ones, unnecessarily living their worst nightmares.
And not a damn thing will change after this day—just more attrition, more violation to bodies, more permanent interruption of life, more new cruel vacancies around the table.
Soon it will all be repeated with sickening, horrible regularity, because this is America now.
This is who we’ve become.
This is the collateral damage of our universal religion.
This is the putrid, stinking fruit of our true shared faith.
This is the bloody yield of our national adoration.
This is what happens when deadly force is placed in our flawed, fearful, quivering hands—and allowed to do whatever it wants to, by those with the greatest power to stop it.
The trigger only has one purpose: to be pulled.
The bullet only has one purpose: to penetrate.
The gun only has one purpose: violence.
And so, violence is what we now have in more abundance than any country on the planet.
This spilled blood is our country’s true bumper crop.
We have a sickening, growing, global monopoly on death.
The gun lusting, trigger-worshipers can dance around it in evasive semantics about “people killing people” and “heart problems,” but the truth is right there in pools of crimson filling our streets, staining grade school classroom floors, and seeping into the cracks of church pews—and it’s on our collective hands now.
This is what we’ve chosen to defend above anything else.
We’ve chosen to defend death.
Somewhere along the way, we decided that we all get to choose who deserves to die and why we’re justified in taking life.
We kill, and then we create whatever narrative we need to bless the violence we’ve exacted:
He was reaching for a gun.
She was running.
They have it coming.
I was frightened.
This was a bad guy.
I was wronged.
Someone has to pay.
He was a threat.
She cut me off.
He was acting erratically.
Now they’ll listen—
—and death and death and death and death.
This is what idolatry does: It makes God in our own hateful image and joyfully bows down to it.
Jesus of Nazareth, Martin Luther King Jr, and Gandhi all tried to give us a better path to walk.
Each lived a life where the boldest and most redemptive force wasn’t force at all.
It wasn’t power or retribution or eye for eye.
It wasn’t aggression or even self-defense.
It was the absolute defiant refusal to respond to violence with violence.
It was peace even in the face of death.
It was counterintuitive love as the last and loudest word.
It was a life of benevolence.
But that life doesn’t get us off.
It doesn’t scratch the itch to our trigger finger.
It doesn’t let us be cowboy and savior and executioner and judge and tough guy. It doesn’t allow us to wield the kind of deadly “don’t tread on me” power we’ve decided we’ve earned.
It doesn’t pump up our chests and inflate our egos and vicariously enlarge our organs.
It doesn’t let us win a perpetual holy war where we’re always the good guy.
And more than all that—it doesn’t feed the NRA and GOP’s bloated, bastard love child masquerading as 2nd Amendment freedom and running amok to brutal results—from our Government, to our gun shows, and into rural church services.
America has always made claim to liberty and equality, and maybe now we’re finally there.
Maybe we’re back to the Wild West and we now all get to kill people when it suits us. Maybe this is the real freedom we’ve now taken hold of.
This is what the Home of the Brave has become: a killing field.
The truth is black lives don’t matter and cops don’t matter and Muslims and gays and kids don’t matter—because those who believe they don’t matter can pull the trigger, remove them in an instant, and feel perfectly patriotic and fully righteous in doing it.
And they can do it all, knowing that no amount of carnage they manufacture will ever be enough to move us all, that no lives lost will be worth more than the money to be made, that no amount of funerals will get the politicians from bedding down with the NRA.
The families of black men and school children and church goers and police officers don’t give a damn whether their killers believed they were good guys or not.
Their loved ones are gone just the same.
Their chairs at the table are empty just the same.
Their bodies are lifeless just the same.
Their blood is on our hands just the same.
America, this is where we’ve chosen to place our faith: In our own trembling, hands with a finger on the trigger and an arsenal in arm’s reach.
And unless we choose a different path—this daily death is our kingdom come, our shameful national legacy, and our greatest shared sin.
And tomorrow will look exactly like today does:
Blood, thoughts and prayers, and empty chairs.
Order John’s book, ‘A Bigger Table’ here.
