NZ has Moral Courage. The US doesn’t.

New Zealand has shown the world what it is to possess the iron strength that is moral courage. They just went through what should be the unthinkable. They didn’t merely offer ‘thoughts and prayers’, nor did they disrespect the memory of the lives lost and dishonor the families by saying we aren’t going to talk about or politicize it out of cowardice, ahem, ‘respect to the victims.’

In New Zealand, and other nations with moral courage, the unthinkable happens once. It stays unthinkable. The need to prevent that kind of horror is met with swift and decisive change. In the United States of America the unthinkable happens, then it happens again, and again, and again in perpetuity. It is no longer the unthinkable. It is the inevitability.

The Inevitability of Mass-Murder in the US

I don’t know if there is a teenager or pre-teen in our part of the world that doesn’t fearfully guess when it is their turn for a mass shooting at their school. I’ve been one. I have friends that survived the Aurora Theater Shooting in Aurora, Colorado. I’ve seen the toll that takes. The survivor’s guilt. It’s real, palpable, and life-altering.

I watched one friend, who I will refer to as G out of respect for his story, be torn apart and fundamentally changed by the trauma of America’s mass-shooting inevitability.

G was a kind, sweet, gentle boy. We’re the same age. We met when we were twelve through our church community. I’m not sure when his birthday falls, but we were between 14-15 when the Aurora Theater Shooting took place. Overnight, he changed. It wasn’t immediately obvious, of course. At least not to me. I’m sure our other friends who were there that night knew that they had changed too. Even if they hadn’t yet discovered the extent of their own difference from who they were before entering that theater, they were someone else leaving it. The people who likely saw the extent of this change in my other friends and G first were their parents.

I watched one of the most openly kind young men I knew grow a shell. A shell of hardness and trauma, yes, but one of self-preservation. That shell started to manifest itself as a hero’s role whenever his school was threatened, even if only in his mind. I vividly remember being at my high school going under a very lenient modified lock-down, which in that moment meant we could move from class to class at the specified times and in stages based on each wing of the school, but couldn’t leave the classroom during class or go to any of the other buildings on our campus. In short, we were locked in. Prisoners of the inevitability of mass shootings in America. The school to prison pipeline was rendered moot in those moments, because the school had become the prison.

I only mention this part of my story to give greater context to G’s. That modified lock-down, the most lenient I’d ever known, before or since, was caused by a ‘situation’ at a nearby school. Remember, this is the digital smartphone era, so it wasn’t that hard to find out what ‘situation’ meant. We were terrified and that turned to curiosity in order to cope. It was an active shooter threat at G’s school.

Thankfully, if there was to be a shooter that day, they didn’t succeed. Yet, they did. No, they didn’t kill anyone, and no, no shots were physically fired by the potential gunman. I say gunman, and realize that term is part of our apathy and parcel of our acceptance of horror. The terrorist that threatened G’s school that day did not succeed in physical harm, but shots were still fired. Invisible ones. The kind that surgery will never heal. The kind that leave the remnants of each bullet fused to the psyche, the soul, of everyone targeted. I saw that irrevocable fusion of horror and trauma amplify my friend G’s shell. As it did, his hero tendencies grew. These weren’t the pure, noble hero tendencies you might think of. They were noble, but they came from darkness. They came from survivor’s guilt. They came from trauma and unspeakable horror. In short, G’s shell became his super-suit.

He would talk about how we would save his friends when another shooter came. He spent many, if not most of his waking hours devising plans to save them. To save us. Whether it be his friends at school or church, he became alike the very hero he went to see when the Aurora Theater Shooting happened. He became a mental Batman. I don’t know how many plans and schemes he cooked up to save his friends. I do know every single one involved his own sacrifice. Every. Single. One. I do know that just like Batman, the man behind the hero, G, no longer had a social life or an external presence. I know his family left everything behind to relocate. To another state, a small town. To save G from the super-suit of horror-induced trauma and the cape of self-sacrifice. I don’t know if it worked. He had to leave everything behind. It was the only way to let go of the cowl, to just be G again. I hope he succeeded, but I’ll never truly know.

The level of radioactive damage that one shooting, in that one movie theater, did to our community still has echoes. I use the term ‘radioactive’ very deliberately. If you were able to force yourself into academic perseverance while dealing with the ever-present knowledge of the inevitability of mass-murder of you and your friends while at school, that was your coping mechanism. There were others. I don’t know what they were, because I didn’t use them. I already told you what my coping method was. Because I had to throw myself into my studies more than ever to cope, I was always hyper focused on class. I learned in my Junior year Chemistry class about radioactive decay. It’s the scientific knowledge that explains how a radioactive substance starts at a high energy level and progressively becomes less energetic. In cycles called a half-life, radioactive decay sheds some part of energy from the substance and what’s left jumps down the periodic table. Since matter and energy can never truly be destroyed, the substance only spreads, getting less energetic and changing form every time it does.

The Aurora Theater Shooting was the beginning of our radioactive decay. Our community now has a half-life. The energy of horror and trauma has dissipated, the shock of spilt blood has changed, but the substance of fear and the inevitability of another has only spread. If you look, you can see it. Little cracks, little changes, little losses across our community that would not be there without our nuclear event. Each of these isn’t little to those who possess them, but from the outside looking in, it all seems minor, only noticeable if you knew us before 2012. Our half-life cycle is undefined. Since we aren’t a rock, it’s more dynamic, more organic than physical radioactivity. Yet it’s no less real and damaging.

Honestly, in hindsight, I sometimes wonder if some punk called in any of our many bomb and shooting threats as some sick joke. There were plenty of other times when even my own school got shooting threats and bomb threats in the wake of the Aurora Theater Shooting in 2012 that didn’t come to pass. I think faking the threat of mass-murder had become a fad in a way. A twisted way for some individuals in our community to cope. Not because they were twisted, but the radioactive damage to all of us, our community, only left them that method to cope. They knew nothing else.

Let’s fast-forward for a moment. As an adult with a career in photography, I have had the pleasure of taking school photos for children. In fact, my earliest ‘official’ photography job was for Lifetouch National School Studios. Every day was a new school. Every day was me being the Batman my friend G used to be. Every day was knowing I could be the last smile a child ever saw. The last one to show them the love they deserve. The last face they’ll ever see. I wore the burden of knowing that when the time came, I would be the last to fill the shoes of protector, parent, hero, caretaker, friend, and sacrifice for these kids. What I did, or didn’t do would fundamentally determine how many might survive and what they saw in their last moments when they didn’t. I always used my hyper-awareness honed from the gauntlet of my experience as a teenager to case the schools, to plan contingencies. To figure out how many I might save, and how quickly I could pick the best plan and execute it. To hope that my blood would spare theirs. To hope I could make amends with God in those very same last moments and be ready to have my Grandpa lead me to meet my maker. I knew it would likely play out that I wouldn’t have time for a formal prayer, a formal request for atonement. I’d be too busy saving the kids to ask God for forgiveness. I’d have to hope my blood was enough to convince Christ to lend me some of his.

That is the reality of the inevitability of mass-murder in The United States of America. The reality of the ever-dripping fear that comes from the awareness that I might be next, or my mom, or her students, or my friends, or my younger cousins, any of us, even all of us could fall in the wake of a homegrown terrorist’s rage. The knowledge that when it does, our blood will mean nothing, our corpses will say nothing that will be heard, and our souls won’t be able to convey the horror we felt in our last moments because we’ll no longer be tied to this life is harrowing beyond measure and truly undefinable.

The Moral Courage in New Zealand

We all heard about the double mass-shootings on Friday March 15th, 2019, right? The ones at two Christchurch Mosques in New Zealand? If anyone didn’t that is only further evidence of our acceptance and embrace of mass murder. Current death toll is 50. 50 lives lost, and countless more shattered. These horrendous attacks were radioactive and unthinkable. They were committed by the textbook definition of a modern terrorist, a right-wing white supremacy extremist. I won’t write his name. I haven’t learned it yet. Out of respect for the victims, I always do what I can to learn about their names and their stories before I allow myself to learn the name of the terrorist who killed them. It’s another way I cope with the embrace of mass-murder America has fostered.

The leadership in New Zealand has moral courage. For that matter, the people do too. Unlike America, where the offer of ‘thoughts and prayers’ has become no more than a mere political PR stunt to look good at being a coward who does nothing, New Zealand’s leadership did something. They banned the only type of weapon ever used to commit this type of terrorist attack, military-grade and semi-automatic assault rifles from civilian life. They even did more. The country has committed to mustering all resources needed to help the families of the victims recover, for as long as they need. Unlike America, where after your child is murdered at school, you immediately have to go back to work so you don’t lose your source of income to pay for the funeral and work hard in order to keep the remaining members of your family from becoming homeless and know you are exceptionally lucky to get any amount of paid bereavement, New Zealand is doing everything they can to support those who just went through the unthinkable. For New Zealand, mass-murder at the hands of a terrorist is the unthinkable. For The United States of America, the very same is the inevitable.

The Vitriol for Victims in The US

How many times have you heard that survivors of mass-murder at the hands of a homegrown terrorist who have the audacity to rally for change are paid actors? How many times have you said it? How many times have you not been fundamentally appalled when someone else says it? For me those answers are as follows: I’ve lost count, zero, and zero.

When anyone calls for reform, for safeguards, for a way to prevent homegrown terrorism from spilling the blood of another young life, they are called the worst things.

“Libtard” “Snowflake” “Paid actor” “Failure” “Idiot” “Leftist” “Weak” “Triggered”

Gun-toting zealots who value their weapons of death more than the spilled blood of innocents

I’m sure there are more, far worse, far more appalling terms used. I’m grateful I don’t know what they are. Many do, and I know they feel great pain when they hear them, and twisted, false joy when they utter them.

I don’t know of anyone, anyone that disputes the importance of the second amendment. All anyone has ever done is ask for some safeguards, some modern interpretation, and some adaptation to the threat of now. The founding fathers could have never envisioned this, and I hope I speak correctly when I say I can’t see them ever condoning it, especially when it’s this perverted use of the second amendment that allows it.

I could be wrong. Who knows? They have been dead for so long what remains of their corpses is no more than worm food. Yet, there any many lives cut short, whose bodies haven’t decomposed, and still, they are treated as an insignificance. A number, a finite bit of data used in statistical queries. That’s all they are now. The sum of their potential, their stories, their dreams, their loves, their pains, their last wishes, no more than a tiny portion of a single dot on a spreadsheet.

That’s all we care about America. Hatred, ignorance, and the spilling of innocent blood. Until we address the crisis of the inevitability of mass-murder, I will never believe otherwise. I know as individuals it’s probable most of us care. Yet, that only ever amounts to thoughts and prayers. When are we going to stop shoving this burden onto God and do something?