Opinion

OPINION | GARY SMITH: Americans have demonstrated exceptionalism in their achievements; why does a cure to violence elude the nation?

Nation can’t seem to get away from violence’s grip

It started out to be such a good week.

Tiring. Active. Busy. But good. A weekend at the PGA Championship with my oldest son, where, to mangle a phrase from Mark Twain, the coldest winter round of golf I ever watched was a spring round in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Then, a birthday party for my mother-in-law that featured an attempt to take a picture of all five of my grandchildren, which was well on its way to working before gravity turned a carefully staged seating arrangement into a pile of infants who weren't quite sure how they got there.

It was, at times, a mess. Fun, family, chaos. All the ingredients of memories being made. And all setting the stage for what promised to be, after so, so many unnerving and anxiety plagued ones, better times. The worst might be behind us. Normalcy, to some degree, was returning. We could breathe again, get on with the mundane business of being us.

A good week. At least at the start. And then ... it wasn't.

Let's not forget. The week of May 14 was just as terrible. It's a sad state of affairs when we're compelled to rank our tragedies by proximity and relative age of the victims. But then, I supposed by now we should have had plenty of practice.

Because for a group of families selected by the randomness of failure and fate, there won't be a lot of happy times to follow. There will be a place that won't be filled, a smiling face that never grows older, a memory where a loved one ought to be.

There won't be many good weeks in Uvalde or Buffalo. Or Santa Fe, Texas. Or Parkland, Fla. Or for those who were at a nightclub in Orlando or a music festival in Las Vegas.

And as I write this I realize I'd left out a supermarket in Boulder, Colo. Or a movie theatre in Denver. Or a company party in California. Or ...

Tragedy tends to be abstract. It happens somewhere else to someone else and human nature keeps us from identifying too closely with events we can't necessarily understand. Wildfires happen out west. Hurricanes happen on the coast. Wars are fought somewhere else. We can change the channel and change the discussion. But apparently we can't change our minds.

And then, we see the victims. The photos of the children, so like ours and the parents and grandparents so like us. And it becomes harder and harder to look away, not to attempt to fathom the unfathomable. This could be us. This could be our pain, our grief, our tragedy.

They were all having a good week.

As a nation, we've told ourselves we are exceptional. History, as least the history we want to embrace, has born that out. We've forged a great society, done great things, created great inventions, gone to the moon and danced among the stars.

And yet, there appears to be a tragic flaw that we can't find our way around. We are a nation born of violence who may have too fully integrated it into our culture. We took up the gun and haven't learned when to put it down. Our greatest attribute and our true exceptionalism is our ability to see what others can't or won't and make it happen. And yet, we can't see a way to forge a path forward that both protects rights in a reasonable manner and keeps our most vulnerable safe.

We are a nation that believes to our core we can have it all in all areas. All areas, apparently, but one.

We fail to recognize the dichotomies. You can't rent a car or buy a beer legally at 18, but you can buy a gun. We've spent two years storming school boards, concerned about the emotional impacts of our children wearing masks to school but we seem fine with emotional impacts of drills meant to tell them what to do if someone comes into their school to kill them.

I don't know how to solve this. But then, I don't know how to fly to other planets or build an automobile or an airplane or a phone that fits in your pocket and tells you how fast your heart is beating. But can't tell you it's broken.

I know these problems were solved when people came together and decided to solve them. And that time is long past overdue.

It started out as such a good week. And then it wasn't. Maybe this time, it can be a good week again.

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