When "Strong" is a Lie

And We Keep Lying

MSD Strong Uvalde Strong Vegas Strong El Paso Strong Newton Strong Gilroy Strong Orlando Strong Highland Park Strong Boulder Strong… and on and on and on.

Whether as twitter hashtags or slogans to sell shirts, or, as heart-felt, genuine expressions of solidarity among humans torn and gutted and weeping, this is the word we use every time there is a mass shooting: STRONG.

It’s like “inconceivable” in The Princess Bride:

I understand the value of the comforting lie. But I also understand that a comforting lie too often told forestalls all other futures. Consider the Ukrainians, because right now, they too live in a country full of weapons of war:

This picture was taken in Kiyv and published by the Washington Post. If anywhere you could imagine would say “Us, Strong!” you might think Ukraine. But Ukraine isn’t imagining a future forever at war; Ukraine is imagining a future peace, an end to war, a peace in which families laugh and thrive. To get there, the quality needed is not strength, but courage. Be Brave.

We, however, do not imagine a future free from mass shootings. We imagine a future forever in fear. There is no honor in bravely striding into a slaughterhouse. To keep walking knowingly into mahem and danger is not “brave,” it’s foolish, it’s stupid, it’s suicidal, it’s crap.

So instead we tell ourselves we are “strong” — we will endure, somehow, with our numbers, unity, and resiliance… we will crouch and hold our breaths against a force so ceaseless and broad it might as well be the ocean.

There we are, marching into the ocean, proclaiming “we are strong!” Holding our breaths, another step, then another.

This is the “strength” that gets you drowned.

Everyone who lives in the United States understands that we go about our schools and workplaces and grocery stores knowing at any moment some deranged individual could decide to express his own personal defects through mass-murder, and that this individual could exact his personal defects quite easily and efficiently, because machines designed explicity for the battlefield killing of humans are made widely available as objects of recreation.

I want to say something about guns. But first I want to say something about diversity. Democracy is messy, but I believe in it. I’d rather live in a messy democracy than a tidy dictatorship. I understand that the tensions of a diverse society cause problems, but those same tensions are a defense. For example, because we are so concerned with our individual liberties, the US could never have succeeded, as China long did, in a “zero covid” attempt. Nor could we, given the militation of parents, teachers, doctors, nurses, grocery store employees, and bus drivers, have just ignored covid and let it tear through our communities. But as we argued and worked through those differences and covid more-slowly worked its way through our society, we found ourselves in a better place. China is currently a shit show of sickness, lockdowns, and violence. But unlike many countries, the US never had to dig mass graves. I’m using a pandemic as a metaphor for gun violence, but that’s okay: they’re both public health threats.

A “zero gun” policy would be like a “zero covid” policy. Idealistic and doomed to failure. While it would definitely reduce gun deaths in the short term, in the longer term… well, I think of what’s happening in Ukraine and I know that things would play out very differently on this continent. No country in the world has more soldiers than we have guns. And deterence is a real thing. “Mutually Assured Destruction” IS MAD, but it’s also the principle that’s kept the world from unleashing apocalyptic nuclear horror for decades. I fucking hate guns, with all my guts I hate guns, because of the gun violence that I’ve been close to and because people I love have been harmed by gun violence. But I know that the guns are here and we have to live with them, to some extent or another.

If you can take the covid metaphor for one more minute: just as “no precautions” people and “all precautions” people (and those between) can come into some kind of (imperfect) ebb-and-flow in a society, which is yes-of-course-flawed, but also better than any singular dictum imposed upon millions of individuals, so could “no guns” and “all guns” people (and those between) come to an imperfect tension, flawed but better than otherwise.

But I think for that to happen, the “no guns” and “less guns” people need to exercise their perspective with the regularlity of putting on a N95 and getting regular booster shots.

You know who goes to Everytown for Gun Safety meetings? Gun violence surivors. You know who goes to Moms Demand Action meetings? Mothers whose small children watched their siblings die after being struck by a stray bullet. All the people who would prefer people not be shot in a Wal-Mart parking lot, but have not yet been personally touched by a shooting are very unlikely to take the actions necessary to bring our society towards a better balance.

It’s as though all the anti-mask and anti-vaccine people were out there spreading covid, and the precaution-minded people just decided to… do nothing. Just… wait. Until they or someone they knew got hospitalized. And then they’d wear a mask. And if someone they knew died, maybe then they’d get vaccinated. People who are NOT gung-ho pro-gun don’t do anything until it’s too late.

And I think part of the problem is “STRONG.”

There’s a myth that tragedy brings communities together, and “strong” is part of that illusion. Outsiders see the insiders come together and proclaim themselves “strong” and it looks like they got it covered. There’s no better way to ward off social support than to play the “strong and silent” type.

If someone murders your child, you may never want to speak again. You might want to crawl underground and die. You might want to howl into the darkness forever. Meanwhile your spouse might re-devote his life to harassing politicians and speaking out on behalf of your dead child. People are different.

But the slogans we adopt claim to speak for us all. And they set the tone. “STRONG” says we are carrying on, unbroken. But Parkland is broken. Uvalde is broken. Everyone touched by gun terror is damaged and these communities are torn apart.

So forget strong. How about MSD ANGRY? UVALDE ENRAGED? How about ORLANDO FIGHTS BACK or BOULDER IS BRAVE?

We should be brave enough to be angry and take steps to defend ourselves. We should be BRAVE enough to disarm the attackers and push them out of range. We should have RAGE in our hearts that they EVER violated our safety and took our childrens’ lives. It’s absolutely righteous to FIGHT BACK against a force that’s trying to kill others and wreck your society, even if that force is broad and vague as the churning sea.

But you can’t fight the sea with bullets, you fight it with dikes, canals, seawalls, jetties, barrier islands, marshes and mangrove forests — and we have to fight gun violence with as many strategies or more. Is it “gun availability” or “mental health”? YES. Throw everything we have at the whole problem. Because no people should have to live like this.

Even in war there is the hope of war’s end.

Where bullets fly randomly, we can only cling to the lie of “strong” while we creep towards the sandbar and hope our next breath is not our last.