America has five distinct stages of grief when faced with a mass shooting.
1. Acceptance
We all run to the streets of the internet, sending our thoughts and prayers through the Twitter and Facebook, hoping that God is online right now so He will get them. This is about the only good part of our grief.
2. Blame
The fun starts off when the news begins to report a description of the shooter. They usually begin either “white” or “Muslim,” depending on the occurrence. A friend of mine works in a House Representative’s office in DC, and she texted me basically a play-by-play of the office’s reaction. She had been called in super early in the morning, shortly after the news broke. Everyone was sitting on the edge of their seat, and the Republican chief of staff was on the phone with someone my friend assumed was with the NRA. The reporter came back and said, “It appears as though the shooter had ties to radical Islam--” and suddenly a gasp of relief went through the room. She said the chief of staff even punched the air. In the words of one party’s presumptive nominee, “Appreciate the congrats for being right on radical Islamic terrorism.” The victims of the shooting no longer matter. Now it is all about figuring out who to blame, with predetermined racial culprits: mental illness for white shooters, and radical ties for anyone else.
3. Political Spin
Everybody jumps on the bandwagon as soon as possible. One tweet about prayers and thoughts, then immediately afterward a tweet about who to blame, and why your particular brand of solution is the most important one. Gun control or a lack of guns comes up with a white shooter, with plenty of rational people on both sides too angry to make any sort of sense. There will be a spike in gun sales as liberals like me begin to demand that we remove guns from our society. With radical Islam, some people reveal their true colors as they hurl insults at the over one billion other peaceful Muslims. War will be threatened, and everyone will be ready to kill ten thousand innocent people in some other country as if that will resurrect our own. In either situation, no progress will be made, because our screams at one another will drown out the tears of those who have lost their loved ones.
4. Victim-Blame
“They should have been armed.”
“They shouldn’t have been out that late in a hoodie.”
“This is God’s punishment.”
5. Forget, Rinse, Repeat
And soon, it’s over. The next child will fall into a gorilla pit or some celebrity will drop a sex tape, and our collective interest and outrage will boil over at that instead. Soon, this day will be forgotten. The next mass shooting will get less and less coverage, because they become more common. Only when this record-breaking number of deaths is beaten will we react again.
And we will do nothing to stop the systemic problems, because that would require our attention for just a few more moments.
