This is What It's Like To Live in America

You never know when it will come to your doorstep.

I went to work on Monday morning. I poured myself a cup of coffee, sat down at my desk, and set to catching up on emails after the long Easter weekend. Less than a mile down the street, people planning on having a similarly mundane start to their workweek arrived in their office—people who’d expected to make idle chat about their spring break activities, have a few meetings and enjoy a lovely, warm day.

Instead, they were murdered, cut down in a matter of seconds by a man brandishing a powerful gun he’d bought just days earlier.

This is what it’s like to live in America.

When I was sixteen years old, a pair of murderers with guns entered a high school and killed a dozen of their classmates and a teacher. It was—as it should have been—an unthinkable act that stunned and horrified the nation and the world, one that dominated our news and our discourse for months and years after. At the time, it seemed inconceivable that such a thing could happen.

Now? It’s just another blood-soaked Monday morning, a sad entry into an ever-growing log, the place names on which might not even register for the average person anymore.

Buffalo. Highland Park. Monterey Park. Half Moon Bay. Coldwater. Nashville. Louisville.

This is what it’s like to live in America.

We take collective notice when these killings happen, but it’s a practiced routine by now. We weep for the dead and the injured, for the lives lost and the lives forever changed, for the countless people left with holes in their hearts that can never be filled again. We shout in anguish, pray for peace and scream for change. We post that fucking Onion article again, a brilliant piece of satire that I absolutely deplore seeing. Then we move on, because it’s impossible to properly mourn a tragedy that happens with this kind of regularity. We’d do nothing but mourn.

This is what it’s like to live in America.

The people in charge have their own routines. They offer up their thoughts and prayers, and assure us they’re in close contact with local, state and federal authorities, and providing whatever assistance they need. They praise the heroic actions of first responders and offer toothless denunciations of evil while scrupulously avoiding taking a single action that could keep the means of murder out of evil hands.

This is what it’s like to live in America.

They tell us to be afraid, but not of the guns. There’s bigger things you should be worried about, they remind us. Someone might use a restroom you don’t think they should be in, or a drag queen might read your child a book. People are coming over the border right now, don’t you know that? Bad people, they’re coming over the border to use the wrong restroom and read your kids that book about gay penguins.

But never the guns.

If anything, the solution is more guns. If only that elementary school had been filled with armed guards, they tell us, if only the teachers had had guns, if only every person in America was locked and loaded twenty-four hours a day, we wouldn’t have this sort of thing happening. We could all live happily ever after in a standoff from a John Woo film, and then—maybe then—we could deal with the real issues facing us.

This is what it’s like to live in America.

The night of the mass shooting in Louisville, the local news—which did an admirable job focusing on the victims and not their killer, the lives and not the deaths—took a moment to share a stat. This was the most mass shootings we’d had in this country by April 10th of any year since 2009, they noted. It was a surreal moment, as though they were reporting on an unusually wet springtime, but this is our weather now. No matter how cloudless and beautiful it is today, no matter what the barometric pressure or what the atmospheric rivers are doing, there’s never a 0% chance that you’ll walk outside to encounter someone with an irrelevant motive and a relevant means to murder you in service of it.

This is what it’s like to live in America.

I was raised to believe in an America that could solve problems, in a place where anything was possible and where life and liberty existed on an equal footing.

I was told that we were the luckiest people on Earth, and I believed it.

I still want to believe it.

This country possesses a tremendous diversity of people, a wealth of different places, experiences and ideas and an innate, preternatural optimism—a wild-eyed belief that we can achieve great things no matter where we started, that who we were yesterday or who we were today should not dictate where we go tomorrow.

I have not given up on that belief—not yet—but every day like this, every time we think and pray and then kick the can down the road, every time we watch our family and friends and neighbors and strangers die, every time we sacrifice our fellow human beings in service of some perverted notion of liberty, every time we cite the intentions of a few dozen men in powdered wigs two hundred and fifty years ago or the specious interpretations of those intentions by a handful of men in robes fifteen years ago as more important than actual human lives, every time we are told that the cost of our freedom to be armed to the teeth is our freedom to live freely, to walk the streets, to go to work or to church or the movies or a concert or the grocery store, to send our children to school, to do any of the things that make life worth living without the fear that everything will be taken away from us, the actual dream of this country drifts further and further from reach, to a place where I fear that my children and future generations may no longer be able to grasp it.

This is what it’s like to live in America.

I have no answers today, no obvious solution for getting the piss out of America’s swimming pool. We are surrounded by millions of guns, and this country will never be completely free of them. But we can’t take that as an excuse to do nothing—not when a few simple changes to our exceedingly-lax laws could have kept this evil man from buying a gun that has no purpose aside from entertainment or murder six days¹ before he used it for the latter. We can’t accept this as normal even if it has become so painfully routine. We can’t let the kind of sick people who wear AR-15 lapel pins to the floor of Congress and send out pictures of their household arsenal as Christmas cards and value guns over human lives dictate our ability to actually live freely.

We need to change.

Because I am sick and tired of being told that this is what it’s like to live in America.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/louisville-shooter-legally-bought-gun-a-week-ago-police-say