The War Forever Needs More or, MAGA Got Its Gun

For a piece published this April in The Good Men Project, (link to full essay here) I wrote:

After yet another predictable and preventable gun-related massacre, the rhetorical questions made their obligatory rounds: Who could have known, what should we have done, what can we do?

Seeing people one day snap and commit appalling acts of violence leads to fingers pointed (particularly by the media and those in the political arena) everywhere but at the root causes: a system that sets many up to fail, a mental health crisis that is woefully — and actively — underfunded, and our Made in America access to guns that’s at once appalling and embarrassing. If our country has become a sociopolitical powder keg, there are many parties indirectly (and in some cases, directly) lighting matches.

Like most of us, I’ve read more than my fair share of increasingly urgent if equally unsatisfactory features about why everyone is so angry. A decade ago, many of these discussions would occur in classrooms, pubs, or at the proverbial workplace water cooler. Today, the internet allows the aggrieved to opine at top volume, social media keeping score in a game no one can win. Somehow, despite these digital bullhorns, many people still claim to feel unheard, unacknowledged, or lost in the mass of info and entertainment overload. As discordant as it seems, even as we have unprecedented access to other people, too many human beings feel more alone than ever.

The issue of violence (in general), violence by men inspired by toxic masculinity (in particular), and gun violence (specifically) is addressed throughout my collection This Kind of Man (more about that and links to purchase anywhere one purchases books, here). Another short story, “The Gold Bullet,” does not appear in my recent collection but was published by Maryland Literary Review last year (read it here). I’ve also written many times about gun violence for different magazines, in two instances referencing Taxi Driver to dive deeper into the peculiar male disaffection that, in America, too often leads to tragedy (“Some Day a Real Rain Will Come” in 2011 and “Taxi Driver at 40” in 2016). Another piece, entitled “50 Bullet Points Concerning America’s Gun Psychosis” was, I figured at the time, my final word on the matter. A few of the “bullets” included:

• Special committees have been formed to explore, just to cherry pick some low-hanging tempests in a tea (party) pot, the proliferation of witchcraft, opposition to the dangers of dancing, the creeping spread of communism, the hidden, evil messages in certain rock lyrics…and the mere suggestion that maybe an amendment written when muskets were cutting edge weaponry is grounds for scorched earth opposition. This is a profound sickness.
• Good guys beat bad guys with the benefit of bigger guns. This is the America we have manufactured, via movies and the marketing of war.
• Speaking of marketing: lobbyists and the political machines they’re paid to pimp have made a sick science of selling unreality to a nation of terrified suckers.
• If the only time you pay attention to gun violence is to grandstand on your Facebook feed (or worse, send “thoughts and prayers”), you are not merely a coward, you’re acting entirely within the pre-approved script.
• Imagine if we felt “hopes and prayers” were sufficient, or all we could do every time a drunk driver killed someone.
• It takes considerably more time and effort to adopt a dog that’s facing being euthanized than it is to purchase a firearm in America.
• Seriously, America is the only place this happens.

You can read the full piece here.

I attempted to tackle this issue via poetry several years ago and the poem “The War Always Wants More” was published by the journal WORDPEACE this week (you can read it, alongside another poem “The Decider’s Decision, here). It’s a heavy topic and I acknowledge that words will do much less than action, but I also retain hope that art uses words (and feelings) to move minds and inspire hearts, and any day we refuse to tolerate the status quo equals progress, however gradual.

The War Always Wants More

(No injuries were reported at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center campus near Bethesda, Maryland, today following a report of a suspected active shooter. –From ABC News Report, 7/6/2015)

Even here, at least one of them had to
have thought, called to attention by shots
fired; the reveille he fears will come
in his dreams, the sounds he can recall
from the fields, where the sun burned
the sand black, like a billion tiny bullets
sprayed from the sky, itself a blank face,
having seen this story unfold over so many
centuries: the conscripted, crazed by a war
that always wants more, have fallen
to their knees — to shoot, to pray, to die.

Even here, at least one of the patients,
recovering at Walter Reed, must have said,
hearing those shots in the hallway, an echo
or even closer, the same shrapnel finding
its way all the way home, from the desert
(or else some other arena, outside time)
to this place where the wounded — working
to become something sort of like themselves
again — lie, not helpless or entirely out of hope,
praying for a ceasefire, a peace they don’t know
can’t come, for the war forever needs more.

Final thoughts, for now: To prevent tragedies we need to understand them, or least make a genuine attempt to do so. Throughout human history, influential and wealthy forces have either ignored or exacerbated systemic crises to consolidate more power and money. Art is forever interested in the human stories that put faces on statistics and attempt to shake us out of our torpor; art forces us to look in the mirror and experience the shock of recognition. Until we see the problem clearly and realize it’s us, why should we expect anything to change?