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The Elephant in the Room
By Fay Funk
I stopped believing in our nation’s government after Sandy Hook.
I remember that day so well. I had graduated from college a few months before and was relentlessly applying for jobs, all day, every day. Once the news of the shooting broke, my day was a bust. I went home, laid on the couch, and cried. This is the only time in my life so far that a national news story has affected me on such an emotional level. When my parents came home we watched the news for hours. I saw my dad cry for the first time in my life, watching CNN. As horrific as that day was, there was a bittersweet sense of hope, that maybe now we could roll up our sleeves and really fix this, this multifaceted problem of glorified violence, poor mental health care, and availability of guns. Would it be easy? No. But could the United States of America, the most powerful, most progressive nation in the world do what was necessary to save its people, even if it meant facing a shameful reality? I had no doubt.
But that didn’t happen. There was just talk. Obama condemned gun violence. The NRA advocated for more guns. Our politicians and talking heads spit out their opinions, some well thought-out and some absurd. Then nothing changed. More people were murdered in the same senseless way. The cycle repeated and I stopped believing in the power of change.
Now here we are three years after Sandy Hook, and there has been yet another mass shooting, this time in my own state of Oregon. I felt the same way I have felt about every shooting since Sandy Hook; dull shock and fear, but most horrifically, a sense of acceptance. We can’t fix this and nothing will change. While reading the news I became aware of the front door to the building I’m in. It’s not locked. Someone with a gun could just walk in and I would be the first to go. One of the best-known films about school shootings, Elephant, directed by Gus Van Sant, takes place in Oregon. This movie draws heavily from another film called Elephant, directed by Alan Clarke, about an Irish Republican Army (IRA) sniper murdering people during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Both are minimalist portrayals of cold and calculated murder with no resolution and with little explanation. The title for Clarke’s Elephant refers to “the elephant in the room,” in this case the underlying societal problems causing The Troubles, problems no one was willing to address. It’s not surprising to hear that the shooter at Umqua Community College was allegedly obsessed with the IRA, a group of young men given the space to commit atrocious acts of violence for 40 years in a nation that staunchly refused to examine its own ugliness. It’s a connection that shouldn’t be ignored. The Troubles in Northern Ireland ended, eventually, though these types of entrenched political conflicts never disappear completely. And maybe that can be a source of hope. If Northern Ireland can pull back the veil and create substantial change to end violence, maybe the United States can do the same thing with our shooting crisis. Maybe we really can move beyond talk, some day. I’m fighting a battle against acceptance of gun violence. We all are, really. By allowing acceptance to continue, we are continuing to ignore the elephant in the room. It’s a battle I’m not winning at the moment though. I stopped believing and it’s not easy to restart, in the face of more shooting, more bloodshed. I hope that someday I can find a reason to believe again.
#Real #GunViolence #MassShooting #SchoolShooting #StopTheMadness
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