We are losing the ability to share in the suffering of others.

Another day, another mass shooting, Indianapolis this time.  Another flag at half-staff.  Another mayor grimly facing the media expressing solidarity with the families of the dead.  Another description of a young man “with a submachine gun of some sort, an automatic rifle, and he was firing in the open,” according to a witness at the scene.  Another body count:  ten this time, four wounded.  Another grim statistic:  this is the third mass shooting in Indianapolis this year. Five people were killed in January, including a pregnant woman; three people were killed only a month ago, on March 15.  And another bloody number:  there were 46 mass shootings in this country in the last month alone.

But the news moves on:  vaccine “hesitancy” up, cases up, death count tops 565,000; Russians sanctioned; Chauvin takes the Fifth; economy booms. 

Way too many of us have lost our ability to share in the suffering of others, to feel.  We have become numb, desensitized to the violence that is everywhere around us.  It has become somehow normal, even acceptable.  We are in a state of constant sorrow that amounts to no sorrow at all, so nothing happens.  The bodies just pile up, as the bodies piled up from the disease that has ravaged not only our country but the entire world.  We changed presidents, but we didn’t change the channel.  The deaths of our fellow citizens have ceased to move us.  We are inert.

It wasn’t always like this.  Think back to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 15, 1963.  Pause to reflect on “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965.  Four little girls were killed in Birmingham, and 22 other people were injured.  Dozens were clubbed and gassed and hit with firehoses and attacked by police dogs in Selma.  There was a reaction to the deaths of the little girls in Birmingham, the images of Black citizens being beaten and gassed in Selma.  We did something: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed and signed into law on July 2, 1964.  The Voting Rights Act was passed and signed into law on August 6, 1965. 

The nation did not stand by mutely.  We did not accept the horrors of segregation and Jim Crow.  It was not acceptable for our fellow citizens to be denied the right to eat in a restaurant, or stay in a hotel, or attend a school, or to vote in an election.  We acted.  We passed laws.  Our government began a long process of enforcing those laws.  Rights were restored. Lives were changed.

But not now.  Today we hear talk again and again of “healing” and “closure” and we do symbolic things like fly flags at half-staff and honor the fallen with candlelight vigils and prayers.  But we do not act.  Our national government, which once passed laws to correct wrongs and deal with the horrors of segregation and discrimination, our congress, the people we elect to speak for us and to do our bidding, today they go to work in the Capitol building in Washington D.C. and they do nothing.

Why is this?  Why has our nation lost its will to act to correct wrongs and heal wounds and in the words of our Constitution, “create a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”?  Those are not mere words on a piece of paper in the National Archives.  They are the preamble to our founding document which established the United States of America, the country that we all live in, the country which we are collectively supposed to govern with our votes, and when attacked, to defend with our bodies. 

What happened to us? 

Well, I think that one of the political parties which elects representatives to our government and presidents to oversee the administration of the laws of the nation, I think that political party learned from the passage of the Civil Rights laws.  I think they learned that passing laws actually works.  Laws accomplish goals.  Laws restore rights.  Laws do insure domestic tranquility.  Laws do secure the blessings of liberty.  Laws express the collective will of the people.

I think one of the political parties decided that they would learn from losing the battle over Civil Rights.  They didn’t like losing.  They didn’t like the changes brought by the passage of those laws in the 1960’s.  They didn’t like the mixing of the races brought on by integration.  They didn’t like sitting next to Black people on buses or in restaurants or sleeping near them in motels and hotels.  They especially didn’t like Black people voting.  So they have been chipping away at those laws ever since. 

They have been appointing judges who have weakened those laws.  They have passed laws in the states which have diminished the effects of those laws.  They have done everything in their power to go back and undo those laws as completely as they can.  They are still doing it.  They just did it to the voting rights of the citizens of Georgia.  They are doing it to the voting rights of the citizens of Texas.  They are getting ready to do it to the voting rights of citizens of other states across the nation.  They didn’t like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, so they’re doing everything in their power to repeal it, statute by statute, line by line, vote by vote.

They have sworn as a political party that they will not allow similar laws to be passed in the future.  And so when people begin to realize that laws should be passed to make it more difficult to buy the kind of semiautomatic military-style rifle used in the killings last night in Indianapolis, and in the killings in Atlanta, and the killings in Boulder, this political party has decided that they will do everything in their power to make it impossible to pass the kinds of laws that were passed in the 1960’s to correct the wrongs of segregation and Jim Crow, because they have seen how those laws are effective, those laws work.  They know if they allow laws to be passed that strengthen background checks for the sale of firearms, or outlaw the sale of military-style semiautomatic rifles – both of which have been proposed over and over and over again – those laws will work.  They don’t want laws that work.  They want the status quo, which is madness, but that is what they want, damnit, and they don’t care how many people get shot and killed, they don’t care how many bodies pile up, they don’t care how many people say they want the laws to change.  They’re not going to allow it. 

In the states where they hold sway by controlling the legislatures and governorships, they are even going to stand against the passage of laws and executive orders which have been shown to save lives by reducing the numbers of cases of COVID.  They don’t care about those dead bodies piling up in their emergency rooms and ICU’s.

I really believe that the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, including the Fair Housing Act of 1968, served as a line of political demarcation in this country.  One political party, the Republican Party, began a decades-long campaign to make us inert as a nation, to nullify the laws that are already on the books, and to insure that new laws they don’t like are not passed.  This party has increasingly over the years become a party of unfeeling politicians, people who were not born or raised with the ability to empathize with others or who decided not to.  You can see it not only in their voting records but on the faces of Taylor Green and Boebert and Jordan and Cruz and Hawley and Cotton and the rest of them.  They don’t feel for others.  They are dead inside.

They want the rest of us to become just like them.  They want us to be dead inside, because if we’re not, then we will react to these mass shootings, these mass killings, in the way we reacted to the bombing in Birmingham, the murders in Neshoba County, the beatings in Selma, the way we should react, with a collective horror and rage against the forces that allow the shootings and killings to continue unabated.

We can decide to act, or we can remain inert as a nation.  But if this is our decision, we will lose our more perfect Union, we will become dead inside just like them, and they will win.

It’s up to us.