America is Broken
Guns, silence, and the protective nature of a Blue Jay
From the window of my kitchen, I saw it. It hopped across the wooden fence then up to the nearby tree and back to the fence, singing its distinctive song, a strong voice that is both a tweet and a caw. It was in protective mode, it appeared. Blue Jays do this, they protect. They can be aggressive and territorial. And when it comes to family, they do not back down. Both the male and the female help build the nest, and when the eggs are hatched, they work together to feed and care for the babies. At around 21 days, when the little birds are ready to leave the nest, the mother and father fly with them to help teach them how to feed, how to live, how to survive.
For several days after the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, my heart ached and my anger grew, boiling inside. How could this happen again? How can we not fix this? But as I internally raged, I was also strangely silent. I didn’t want to talk about it with anyone, not even my wife. I didn’t post anything to social media. Maybe I was in my personal protective mode. But I also wonder if my silence came as a kind of respect for those whose personal worlds had been devastatingly changed forever—the brothers and sisters, the parents, the grandparents, the husbands, a community left behind to manage a grief so catastrophically unimaginable.
I have been a reporter by trade for many years. Many journalist have said that one of the reasons they decided on the profession was the belief that maybe one of the stories they would tell might shine a small light on an injustice so that change could happen. But over and over stories of guns and mass shootings are being told, and nothing of consequence breaks the impasse, not even dead children. It was believed that after Sandy Hook in 2012—twenty dead elementary school children and six teachers—maybe this country had finally reached its limit on gun tragedies, that the gun lobby’s strangle-hold on America was coming to a close.
Ten years after, nothing has changed.
America is exhausted. Gun violence, climate change, racism, social media disinformation, Covid, toxic nationalism, and death of American democracy—there is no chance to breathe. Maybe that’s why I was silent. I needed to breathe.
After steeping in this horror for days, I’ve come out of my silence, reading news and opinion, and I’m left with little else but sorrow and anger. How could it be anything else? My heart is broken for the mothers and fathers, for America. But I’m also enraged. How can an 18-year-old buy an AR-15 and more ammunition than a U.S. soldier takes into battle, and no one notices it, no one thinks maybe this is not right? I’m sickened by the inaction of police in Uvalde after only days prior being trained on just this kind of incident. And I’m disgusted that the NRA somehow believed it was entirely appropriate to move forward with a national convention in the same state just days after blood was splattered inside an elementary school classroom. Arm the teachers, they say. Trained officers with guns were right there and it didn’t make a damn difference.
Those in Washington who stand firm on gun rights think they are showing toughness by preventing gun reform from moving forward in Congress. Instead, they reveal a blind American weakness. How other countries have confronted the issue has been written about over and over, but it needs to be written again and again. Two examples. More than 50 people were gunned down in two mosques in New Zealand 2019. In less than a month, the government banned most semi-automatic weapons. Know how many mass shootings there have been in New Zealand since then? None. In 1996 in Australia, a gunman killed 35 people. Six months later the government passed a new common-sense gun law. One million firearms were destroyed and in the last 16 years, there has been only one mass shooting in Australia.
But in America, children die so we can keep our guns.
We want to save our places of worship, supermarkets, street corners, and schools from becoming killing grounds, but we simply have decided not to.
We are broken.
The Blue Jay at my window will stop at nothing when protecting its children. Nothing. Its instinct and nature will not allow any other outcome. It will nurture its young and defiantly stand between its babies and the predators seeking to harm. As humans, we all want to do the same. It’s our nature, too. Yet we are permitting a more than 200-year-old Amendment, written during the days of muskets and flintlock pistols, and the faux toughness of America’s “greatness” to put all of us at risk, especially our children, because we believe that somehow owning a killing machine is more important than sending our children to school without fear of being shot.
Photo: Brian Forsyth