A Nation at Half-Staff
I don’t know what a flag at half-staff means anymore. There is not a day I don’t see one - not one day I can remember in the last five years. When I was growing up flags at half-staff were flown on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and when presidents died. The flags flew at half-staff when the Challenger exploded, when President Kennedy was killed and when the Marine barracks were bombed in Lebanon. Today, every day has become a national day of mourning. Every day we count our losses, bandage our wounded, and offer our condolences to the survivors as if it were just another part of our daily national routine. But has anyone noticed that none of these atrocities ever inspires the kind of shame or defiance that seeds a strategy that might actually prevent them from occurring as reliably and predictably as they do? We just cower and mourn and passively accept the silly bromides that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” This, despite the fact that semi-automatic and automatic weapons are designed for one, solitary purpose: to kill other human beings – not animals, not hunting trophies, not predators, but people, in this case, our fellow citizens. Guns that promiscuously spray hundreds of rounds of hollow point ammunition are instruments of war pushed on a civilian population that has been cowed and bullied into believing that they are safer, or “freer” for it; whatever that word means in the context of weekly mass shootings.
But what I suppose I have grown weariest of are all the acts of public hand-wringing, the sanctimonious platitudes about God’s will and the sick fatalism that somehow this is the price we have to pay to preserve everything we hold dear. If this really is the case let’s just stop whining and crying about it. Let’s “man up” as some would say and accept the grim reality of this place we call America. Gun rights advocates and the moneyed interests that bankroll them tell us that we just have to accept living in a world with concealed guns all around us in what is essentially a war zone. What else does one call a place where we are told easy access to arms is our only protection from violence?
So, if this is the inevitable truth that we all have to come to terms with, can’t we just all agree to end the morally vapid moments of silence, the obligatory prayers and the glib tropes about unfathomable losses? And please, no more flags at half-staff, because at the end of the day they really don’t mean anything. They are hollow gestures because we just don’t care enough. We only pretend to care. In fact, maybe it’s time that we don’t have any flags at all. If we cannot prevent civil society from devolving into a perpetually migrating killing field then it seems to me that we really are no better than a failed state - a defeated nation; cowardly, craven and impotent. Let’s just admit to it all, start building our personal cache of assault weapons and get on with life in the domestic war zone.
