“The blood is on so many hands that history will weep in the telling,” wrote the late Roger Ebert for the Daily Illini following an infamous bombing of a black church in Alabama which killed six children. “And it is, not new blood . It is old, so very old, and as Lady Macbeth discovered, it will not ever wash away. It clings and it waits and in its turn it kills again.”
The blood shed in the early Orlando morning is the same blood spilt that day in 1963. It was spilt by a man full of ignorance and fear just as countless other atrocities have occurred at the hands of the ignorant.
But his ignorance is not exclusive to him, for it lives in millions of us. And yesterday it reared its ugly head as it has time and again. It comes down not to religion, guns or laws. Rather it comes down to fear– a phobia warped by a radical version of ideas and general blindness for those we do not understand. It’s a fear that causes us to be unwilling. Unwilling to accept, to change, to read the facts, to humanize and to seek knowledge.
But the ignorance of the man who shot all those innocents did not die with him. Like a virus it was born of the killings, mutated and found a host in our leaders and talking heads.
But maybe that ignorance is not new. In fact it is “old, so very old.” We turned the dead into statistics and conversation as we have after every terrorist attack. Instead of mourning and remembering, we chose to argue over politics.
Our talking heads sought to make it either black or white. Was it terrorism or islamic terrorism or was it merely homophobia? Was it a lack of gun control or a lack of “good guys” with guns? How abhorrent.
But the facts point to a gray area where it is both, with both nourishing the other.
Further, an egotistical demagogue sought to benefit from it.
In a moment that centered not on one’s intelligence or lack thereof, he chose to forget the slain who inhabit the America he loves, though I’m nearly sure he could not care less for them. They do not exist in his America, just as knowledge does not exist in his brain.
But this comes compounded on a week full of stupidity for the presumptive nominee and yet the party he represents seeks to leave him the face of it, if only to keep someone else's ideas out of office.
Sickening, despicable, maddening and beyond reprehensible. And his followers will forgive him because it’s not as if they cared for others either. There is no hyperbole in the describing of his actions or ours.
We Americans as well chose not to stand by the slain, we chose to fall trap to the conversation, inserting our own obliviousness to the sludge pile. We argued religion and whose is more apt to love instead of hate. We ignored the hypocrisies of our actions which fall in contrast to the words our Gods taught us.
One tweet stated the user couldn’t find a comparable word for Jihad in Christianity. Lest he forget the two which are equally notorious and vile: crusade and inquisition.
We are a repugnant society not worthy of the heaven so many of us yearn for. I can only hope the pearly gates are forever slammed shut. Outrage is an underwhelming word. This should be cause to inflict change not to banter, but yet as we’ve proven time and again, we choose not to stand up to what brings us down but to fall flat and sweep it under the rug.
We seem so poised to warhawk and blindly sic the dogs, hell bent on destruction. It's so very American to always have the finger inches from pulling the trigger. It seems so purely American to condemn those who are not white, straight and Christian.
We seem to be so ready to throw politics after every action as we ordinary people sit behind keyboards believing we know the best course of action over the experts.
It seems, too, that those willingly hawking for war behind a screen are so unwilling to fight the battle when called upon. We are a nation of hypocrites and faux-patriots.
We plead for action always believing there is more to be done. We call our leaders weak and un-American and then turn on them when the actions we wanted taken become failed exploits.
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Is it too hard to reason? Is it too hard to change? Is it too hard to compromise? Is it too hard to feel compassion? Is too hard to stop stroking our own egos over death?
We stream the words, thoughts and prayers to our artificial internet lives. Thoughts and prayers are not enough, standing with the community is not enough. Moving with the community is a start but will not yield the results needed.
Hate is hate, it has not one face nor one body. It has many forms all cloaked in callowness and fear.
This is the country we live in and this serves as a stark reminder. No matter the shackles of bondage broken or the Stonewalls opened, or mosques built, we have more than miles to go for equality, acceptance, understanding of beliefs, of quelling of fears.
We have more to learn, more to gather before we attack, lest we forget our history and end up with more dead than there ever needed to be.
We failed those who died and we continue to fail those who are living. As Ebert says, the blood does not wash away it only waits to kill again. And it is us who let it.
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