Empty Laments and So Many Words

“Where were you when 9/11 happened?” Or Columbine… or the Challenger explosion… or Kennedy’s assassination? There are events that leave a collective scar upon the conscience of our society, that mark us deeply as a people and as a country. Will the deadly and bloody events of Sunday, the deadliest shooting in American history be one of those moments? 

I woke up on Sunday morning to the giggles of my little girl, staring at me in the face. “Get up papa,” she laughed before turning around and running out of our room. I rubbed my eyes, gathered myself just a bit and thought, well I’m going to just lay here for a bit while she sprints around the apartment… why is my child such a boisterous morning person?! I grabbed my phone and was immediately met by a notification, “20+ dead, 50 wounded in mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando.”

There was no shock in my reaction. There was no surprise. There was no outrage… no sadness… no emotion. I simply thought, “Yeah, sounds about right.” There have now been 1,000 mass shootings since Sandy Hook, since we declared, “Never again!” So much for our collective will.

One-thousand mass shootings in 3-and-a-half years. 

1,000. 

Let that sink in for a moment.
We just hit the century mark.

1,000… and just for good measure, outside of the Orlando mass shooting, there were 5 other mass shootings that weekend with 10 more being killed and 12 wounded.

As the numbers continue to grow day-by-day-by-day, I’ll admit I have become numb to these events, I have lost my ability to lament or grieve in these tragedies. They have all become numbers, statistics. There once was a day when the lament came quickly, even easily but I fear that my heart has hardened beyond repair and I wonder if our collective national heart has too. 

In the wake of these tragedies, it seems that everywhere I turn is another argument full of feigned outrage and platitudinous compassion. The talking heads on the news are full of the same sentiments reading from the same worn, tattered, overused script. Social media screams out with the same sort of overused collective vitriolic scream: “We must ban guns!”; “We need to arm every citizen!”; “This is a mental health issue!”; “Guns aren’t the problem, people are the problem!”; “Muslims are the problem! Ban them!”; “Why isn’t the President using ‘Radical Islamic Extremist’? (He’s a secret Muslim you know!)”; “This is ISIS and the President isn’t dong anything to protect us!”; and on and on and on the back and forth grows. 

In the wake of these tragedies we have become practiced screamers, spewing angry words from our fingertips, we trot out our trite and cliché hashtags, and link article after article to support our point, and when all else fails we become professional “Memeticians”*.** We have turned to blaming liberals for being weak and conservatives for being bigoted; liberals for being socialists who want to take away our guns, and conservatives for loving guns more than people. We have thrown blame and dodged it just the same, over and over and over in this cycle we inhabit. 

And as we are tossed about in this spin cycle of our creation, we have lost our ability to lament. We have lost sight of the real tragedy that has unfolded in front of us and continues to unfold in front of us day-by-day-by-day. We are more concerned with winning the argument or maintaining our “rights,” whatever we believe they are. We have replaced lament with grand-standing and grief with self-righteousness. We see the suffering and the pain but we do not feel it, we cannot feel it, we’ve become numb, stuck in our feigned outrage and platitudinous compassion.

Monday afternoon I spent some time on YouTube catching up on the Tony’s. I wanted a break from the banality of the spin cycle. I watched beautiful performances and even caught a couple of acceptance speeches. However, there was one sonnet in particular–yes a sonnet–that captured my heart and broke the cycle for me. Lin Manuel Miranda stood in front of a theatre full of people and spoke passionate words of truthful lament into the hearts of a nation:“

When senseless acts of tragedy remind usThat nothing here is promised, not one day…We lived through times when hate and fear seemed stronger;We rise and fall and light from dying embers,
remembrances that hope and love last longerAnd love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love
cannot be killed or swept aside”

I stepped outside of the spin cycle and was reminded of what really matters in this life. It is not the argument, it is not my rights or your rights, it is not fear and terror, it is not platitudes. Perhaps what was the most surprising of all was that it only took a minute. A minute to listen to an artist call attention to the truths that surround us. That above all it is love. There is faith, there is hope, and there is love but the greatest of them is love, love is what remains. And we are implored, follow the way of love!

We are beyond the point of well reasoned arguments and logical statements and sentiments. We need our artists to help us feel again, to stir up a passion within us that we cannot ignore and cannot deny. We need our artists to call us out of our malaise, to pull us out of our spin cycle now more than ever. We need artists to employ their craft to remind us of our story, of our shared humanity. 

Who will write the song of Orlando? We need you. Who will write the song that will help us grieve, that will connect us to a love unmistakeable? We need songs that help us grieve! Poems that call us towards love! Paintings that illuminate and reveal what lies beneath the story! We need sculptures and sonnets and dance! Artists we need you! Artists, let me say it again, we need you! Our culture needs you. Now more than ever. Please tell the story of Orlando, make us feel it like we’ve never felt anything before and never, never, never let us forget.

* Memetician (n) someone who utilizes memes to spread an idea, behavior, or style from person to person throughout culture.
** I too am guilty of each of these activities and behaviors.