On December 14, 2012 in Newtown, Connecticut Adam Lanza murdered his mother by shooting her to death. He then went to Sandy Hook Elementary School and shot 26 people. 20 of those murdered were children between 6 and 7 years old.
Since then there have been several hundred to more than two thousand mass shootings in the US. The reason the numbers are so disparate is we haven’t even taken the time to uniformly decide what a mass shooting is. That is how little we care.
When I saw what happened, or more distinctly, what didn’t happen after Sandy Hook I lost hope that the US would ever alter its stance on guns. If people stood implacable with the bodies of dead babies cooling on the ground, then nothing was going to change us.
A year earlier, during the Republican Recession, a group of protesters laid claim to Zuccotti Park in Manhattan’s financial district. In September 2011, the group camped out in what they renamed “Liberty Square” protesting the cozy connections between corporate and political power. They called out the 1% and it was a call out that resonated with thousands as protests sprang up around the globe.
While Occupy Wallstreet has not disappeared the global protests of 2011 brought about no substantial changes. American politics are more drenched in blood money than ever. Not one executive was held responsible for the damage caused by the 2008 recession. Instead they were bailed out with the gift of hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer’s money.
I actually get the choice some people made in 2016. It was the same choice many of us thought we were making in 2008. A choice for change. But the current president is corporate corruption incarnate. Over a 100,000 Americans have died during the current administration’s management of this pandemic crisis as he and his corporate cronies make billions. We are still dying. They are still getting paid.
That’s when I lost hope that America would ever join the ranks of the truly developed world. The world that takes for granted parental leave, health care, and a good and affordable education. America will embrace its particularly brutal form of capitalism until it is beaten to death by it.
Now we are inundated by what even the white, liberal media calls riots because the protests are made up of mostly people of color. Most of them Black. Another racial demographic would be seen as uprising. The names of so many slain by the state chanted by a desperate crowd. Even with the stark contrast of the way the violent, but mostly white, people demanding haircuts were treated by these very same police forces just days earlier some hold fiercely to their ignorance.
The dismantling of the progress made during the 60s has only accelerated under 45’s regime. His racism, his misogyny, his disdain for those suffering poverty, are even more obvious now than before he was inaugurated. Yet an unforgivable minority not only support him but his every nihilistic, narcissistic Twitter tantrum.
He is ready and willing to wield the military against his people because he doesn’t see the protesters as his people. He has deeply internalized the Republican rhetoric of “If you are not with us, you are against us.” Only, for him, that means unquestioning obedience at the least, with fawning devotion preferred. Anyone who is a nonsupporter is the enemy. That includes the populations of entire states.
And that is why I still have hope.
Bacon’s Rebellion, an armed uprising by Virginia settlers led by Nathaniel Bacon in the 1670s, scared the elites not because a raucous group of people managed to take down the Virginia state capital, but because the group was a multiracial coalition. A multiracial coalition that included white people. Shaken and profoundly anxious about the possibility of future multiracial alliances Virginia’s lawmakers double down on the separation people through made up racial categories accelerating and broadening the legal distinctions between “white” and “black” inhabitants. This was the true birth of race-based chattel slavery in what would become the United States of America.
Centuries later Martin Luther King is often depicted as supported by a rainbow coalition. In truth, in his time, he was hated by the white establishment. Yes, there were and always have been white people who fought for civil rights, but they were a stark, if powerful, minority. Dr. King was mostly fighting for Black people with other Black people. Then he started working on the Poor People’s Campaign. Proposed as a “middle ground between riots on the one hand and timid supplications for justice on the other” with support from leaders of Native American, Puerto Rican, Mexican American, and poor white communities the Poor People’s Campaign was a multiracial coalition. That’s when he was murdered.
Looking at the assassinations of the 60s you see a similar pattern. The Kennedy’s, both John and Robert, accumulated a multiracial following. Both assassinated. Malcolm X wasn’t assassinated during his days of fiery rhetoric. He was killed when he started reaching hands across the aisle. Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was murdered by the state for his charismatic outreach to coalitions with similar goals of jobs, insurance, a fair wage, and quality education. He was only twenty-one.
The Powers That Be are deathly afraid of multiracial partnerships, especially those including Black and white people. And our current president is creating exactly those alliances with his self-absorbed incompetence. So, I have a little bit of hope. An ember. Lone and vulnerable and barely smoldering. But there. Maybe, this time, there will be change.