Under The Gun

             The shooting by a police officer of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Mo. may have less to do with racism and more to do with what appears to have become the American way of handling things – “shoot first, ask questions later.”

 Just one of many examples: A 47-year-old Florida man shoots and kills a 17-year-old black youth because the teenager was playing his car radio too loud. The shooter later told police he felt threatened. A jury recently decided he was the threat and he was given life in prison. Two lives destroyed, needlessly. Why?  In another Florida incident in which a whole series of peaceable actions could have been taken to resolve a traffic dispute, a gun was used. Although no one was killed, a man went to jail, and lives were disrupted.

In Ferguson, after the St. Louis grand jury decided not to file charges against the police officer, protestors responded by shooting police officers. Meanwhile, a group of “volunteers” armed with guns and led by a weapons engineer took to the rooftops in Ferguson to protect businesses from looting by the protestors.

Just days before the protests began in Ferguson, two Cleveland police officers arrived at a park, where someone reported a youth wielding a gun. They were warned the weapon might be a fake. Two seconds on the scene and one of the officers shot a 12-year-old-boy whose pellet gun was missing the orange tab that indicates it’s not a real gun.

            It appears we are substituting a civil society built on enlightenment and justice to a land where the individual is the law unto himself. A Pennsylvania state lawmaker recently took that approach during a holdup near the state Capitol. (See Harrisburg lawmaker exchanges gunfire with would-be robbers). The governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, seems to endorse the idea. He recently signed a law that allows gun owners to sue cities that adopt laws to protect the public from gun violence.

America is a culture of guns. Fear mongering is used to fight any effort to regulate guns for safe communities. There are those of us who still believe in the preamble of the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln’s consecration of the words “We the People” in his Gettysburg Address: “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” Funny, the words almost sound fanciful. 

 

                                           Photo by Oleg Volk

The Declaration of Independence, the foundation on which the Constitution was drafted, establishes that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People do have a right to own guns, but should that right infringe on those who don’t own guns or on the right of the society at large to live without fear of firearms? The challenge is finding a balance, which today is clearly lacking. Gun carnage appears to be unfolding across the land.

Allowing people to carry guns as weapons for protection seems to have opened a Pandora’s Box for anarchy. Last June, two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian were killed by a young couple whose motive was they hated the government. The couple took their own lives, but not before shouting “this is a revolution!” and covering the bodies of the officers in a Gadsden flag, the traditional American flag with the coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”

            Gun violence has long been out of control in America. How can we not say something is wrong when 20 elementary school children are shot dead sitting at their desks because an emotionally disturbed young man was allowed easy access to an array of powerful firearms? The irony is we do say something is wrong, but we do nothing to address it. 

            Gun violence is so pervasive that it has become matter-of-fact in our lives. We are numb. We do nothing. We choose to live under the gun.  

Re-arranging the Deck Chairs

            The nation’s mid-term elections have swept Republicans into power in the Senate, added to their already significant majority in the House, and chastened President Obama to announce that he has heard the voters and will work with the GOP to break the years of gridlock in Washington.

            Outgoing Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has, as the presumptive new majority leader, pledged to work with Obama. The president said he’d “enjoy a Kentucky bourbon” with the man who has spent 30 years in Congress. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), 31 years in Congress and the presumptive new minority leader, has promised to work with McConnell.

            Hopeful as it all sounds – and hope appears at the moment to be the only thing to hold onto – the reality is that the same people that created the gridlock are still in Washington, only their seats have changed.

            So, will the Republican Congress and the Democratic president finally get down to such pressing issues as immigration reform, tax code overhaul, foreign policy in the Middle East, Ebola, energy, transportation, climate change, agriculture, education funding, banking reform?

One day after the election GOP House Speaker John Boehner fired a shot across the presidential bow, warning Obama not to take unilateral action on immigration reform. He and McConnell have promised to repeal Obamacare, but the Republicans don’t have veto-proof majorities in either congressional chamber. The votes, if they occur, will largely be symbolic and counter-productive. None of these sounds like a good start, but they could be, and may actually lead to the negotiating and compromising that can produce good legislation.

 

The S.S. United States

The real test of bipartisan cooperation will come when a vacancy occurs on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nothing brings out partisan fighting like a nominee for the highest court in the land. Will they still work together then?

                It used to be, and perhaps this is wishful thinking, that politics ended when it came time to hammer out agreements on policy.  Politics now seems to always trump policy. Our system of government is set up in such a way that the majority and minority have to deal with one another, but in recent years the two parties have seen ways around this by either not holding legislative sessions or shutting down the government. Neither tactic has proven constructive or productive.

                We have a tendency in this country to exaggerate the policies of the party we oppose as destructive to the country. Certainly, some of those policies are, but that’s why we have a deliberative process, publically and legislatively, to determine whether a policy is good or bad. Democracy is supposed to be about finding common ground on issues that everyone can agree, though not necessarily like. That ideal seems to have been lost.

                It’s not that the nation doesn’t have good leaders. It does, and in both parties. What the nation needs is a different approach to leadership; an approach that is innovative and inclusive, not combative and exclusive. Maybe now that will occur. We have three test cases to see whether divided government can work in our democracy: Washington, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

                Obama et al, and McConnell and Boehner et al, may have to re-think strategies that move the country forward while keeping their members and voters, well, if not happy, at least grateful the country isn’t going to hell in a hand basket.

 Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov.-elect Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled general assembly, and Maryland’s Republican Gov.-elect Larry Hogan and the Democratic-controlled state legislature, must craft  creative ways to move their agendas, if they, and their states, are to succeed.

Six months should tell us whether the election heralded in a new era of substantive cooperation and robust leadership or just re-arranged the deck chairs on a sinking ship.