The Las Vegas Shooting: Your Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough
Yesterday I shared this on Facebook:
To which a couple of rightfully disheartened and dear friends responded:
I also agree. Jim Jeffries agrees. The conundrum we’re faced with here is that writing thoughtful blog posts/angry open letters (yes, I’m willing to swallow the irony on this one), expressing our outrage on social media, or showing our support for celebrities who speak up is not the answer.
We’re living in a time when couch-protesting is our reality — with one simple click of a button, we can express how we feel and then pat ourselves on the back for voicing an opinion. And we do it all from the comfort and safety of our own homes. Even worse, we are trapped inside of an echo chamber where the ones who see what we post are likely the ones who already agree with us… hardly the audience we need.
I will readily admit that the internet has opened up a world of opportunity and I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from anyone. We have various platforms on which to protest or propose change and (putting fake news f*ck-ups aside), the era of the interwebs has put a little bit of power back into the hands of the people. But retweeting that gun control is a problem is equivalent to buying a pair of one-size-too-small skinny jeans and willing them to fit. It’s not enough. You have to do the work if you want change.
We’ve moved so quickly into a new digital reality that we haven’t had time to truly understand the impact that kind of shift has had on the one we used to know — when people had to put on pants to put up a fight. They had to actually show up somewhere. Is it possible that reducing the effort it takes to be heard has diminished our commitment to the cause?
We say we want change, but we’ve stopped showing up.
And the N.R.A hasn’t.
Its members haven’t.
In 2015, The New Yorker published an article, “Taking on the N.R.A,” in which author James Surowiecki wrote:
“The N.R.A.’s biggest asset isn’t cash but the devotion of its members. Adam Winkler, a law professor at U.C.L.A. and the author of the 2011 book ‘Gunfight,’ told me, ‘N.R.A. members are politically engaged and politically active. They call and write elected officials, they show up to vote, and they vote based on the gun issue.’”
I know the problem is not this simple. I know some of us feel there isn’t anything we can do (as a Canadian, I feel especially helpless). We’re slowly becoming desensitized and unmotivated because, as Conan O’Brien said yesterday:
“…Today, when I came into work, my head writer was standing in my office with a sheet of papers and he said, ‘Here are the remarks you made after the Sandy Hook shootings and the Pulse Nightclub attacks in Orlando. You might wanna look at them to see what you might wanna say tonight.’ And that, that struck me. How could there be a file of mass shooting remarks for a late night host? When did that become normal? When did this become a ritual? And what does it say about us that it has?”
It says that movements have gone from grassroots to Facebook groups and I’m just not convinced the efficacy of that is the same. It says that we let algorithms assign our freedom of speech to a specific audience. It says that we let a master of manipulation, Roger Stone, make a “president” out of Donald Drumpf. It says that the power and political pull of the N.R.A makes us feel like there’s no point.
But take a moment right now and try to imagine a world where Martin Luther King Jr. looked at segregation and thought, “The law is the law. There’s nothing I can do.” I don’t want to live in that world and neither do you.
So, today I don’t have the answer for you. All I can tell you is that giving up isn’t it.