Death begets death
From New York Magazine:
Donald Trump has released what may be the last budget proposal of his presidency, and the contents are predictably unsettling. The spending cuts he has proposed are plentiful, and they are steep; they would knife what’s left of the American welfare state to the bone. Trump wants to cut $2.8 billion in homelessness-assistance grants, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, and $292 billion overall from Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, better known to most as food stamps.
This news reminded me of a post I wrote two years ago on Tumblr, the day of the Parkland shooting, when I was trying to wrap my mind around why Congress wouldn’t do anything about to stop preventable mass death. It was Valentine’s Day, so the timing is apropos. It’s reproduced below.
Last night, my pastor quoted 1 Corinthians 13. An intuitive choice when a holy day of the Christian faith (Lent) collides with a holy day of the world (Valentine’s Day). “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.” I prayed about those 17 people killed in Florida and wondered what the truth about this situation was.
My sense is that gun control is necessary, but that it is not the truth. Meaning that it does not get at, reveal, or even attempt to resolve the essence of what the hell is going on here. My sense is that the truth has something to do with our national commitment to death — to increasing spending for children’s health insurance but only if we increase spending for the police and military too, to letting funding lapse on thousands of community health centers in order to use its restoration as a bargaining chip in budget deals, to being content with segregation and concentrated poverty and school-to-prison pipelines.
At this point, it is no longer sacrilege to acknowledge that mass shootings are a reflection of our political commitments (the NRA was trending on Twitter not long after news about the shooting broke). But if we’re going to make acknowledgements then we should get them right. The perversity of our political commitments is far more far-reaching than our ideas about gun control. We know that our politics are a reflection of our collective spirit. Unfortunately, our collective spirit is murderous.
We will, in all likelihood, be horrified and outraged and making grief-stricken appeals to God in the aftermath of similar tragedies a few more times by this year’s end. We should go ahead and ready ourselves for that. Not to become desensitized, but to become prepared to make new arguments. We are not helpless and we are not confused. These shootings are not senseless. They make sense. They are a product of a world we created. We have chosen death. And if we want to choose life, we have to be willing to honor all that life requires.
