I’ve spent the past week reflecting on the Orlando Massacre at the gay nightclub but this just reminded me of the Charleston shooting at a black church and the 20 children who were violently taken away from us at their school. We all mourn because heaven is too crowded with angels and we are left here asking why. Sam Sanders, a reporter from NPR, remarked that shootings like this are even more tragic because they happen in safe places. And then he prompted a question that I didn’t even know I was asking myself until now. Why do we still need safe places?
Because the everyday lives of marginalized people are still filled with inherent danger. One of the mothers shot in Charleston needed that space because black mothers across the country are afraid their teenage sons will be shot for carrying a bag of skittles by a vigilante— like what happened to Trayvon Martin — or their husbands can be put in a chokehold by the police and killed for selling loose cigarettes — like Eric Garner was by the NYPD. The men in the gay club needed a place like that club to go with their boyfriends and be able to kiss them without strangers cringing or coming up to yell at them about how their love was offensive or perverted. In the aftermath of the Orlando shooting, there have been countless social media campaigns like #keepkissing which features couples—no matter the sexual orientation—kissing to send a message that this event will not defeat love. These demonstrations are beautiful and thought-provoking but why do we only show outrage at each other’s pain during these tragedies? The Orlando shooting is horrific but so is the girl in high school being branded as a dyke and the man who was legally fired for being gay. These don’t make the top story on the nightly news and neither does the kid bullied so much that he took his own life. Gay people are 30 times more likely to take their own lives than their straight counterparts and this number has doubled since the 80’s. These situations are sad and dehumanizing so many are more comfortable not talking about it. We can do better. That is the bedrock of our republic—that we can do better. The Constitution begins with “We the People, in order to form a more perfect union…”
The second part of that statement declares that the inception of our country was inspired by the belief that—no matter how perfect we think we are—we can always do better. We broke off from an oppressive monarch and established a great country but we had enslaved and abused an entire people. We abolished slavery and are a better country for doing it although we still feel the ramifications of this oppression in race relations today. Almost a century ago we were a great nation in the world but half our population could not participate in our democracy until we passed women’s suffrage. Then we passed the Civil Rights Act and desegregated schools and only recently we have allowed homosexual couples the right to marry. Rightfully, we should be proud of these accomplishments but this certainly shouldn’t eclipse the problems we still have today. We abolished slavery but that doesn’t mean that the Black Lives Matter movement has nothing to say and women can vote but they still make almost a fourth less than their male counterparts in the workplace. Every year we get to change our government by going to a local elementary school or firehouse to vote. Things won’t get better, however, if we keep having voter turnout of 60 percent during presidential years and some as low as 25 percent in odd years. The United States will only get better if we change it.