I grew up in Highland Park, Illinois. While the windward side of Oahu has been my home for many decades, I grew up in Highland Park, attended middle and high school there, and learned bucketloads of those important life lessons we’re supposed to learn during our formative years.
Thus, this 4th of July took a wrenching twist for me. I’d planned a fun day ending with a family trek to watch Kailua Beach fireworks. As we hear over and over after “incidents” occur, no one would have thought that Highland Park, Illinois, would become simply one more tragic footnote along our vast American highway of mass shootings. Seven killed, dozens injured, thousands traumatized, millions upset. And we shrug.
Not every person who’s been marginalized, ignored, dumped on, or worse ends up taking out his or her aggressions by indiscriminately firing away. Not every paranoid person who writes bad things repeatedly on social media ends up shooting up a church, school, parade, concert, shopping mall, party, celebration, workplace, hospital, or home; but to let this continue with the minimal efforts we see in this nation to fix things in some way, well, that in and of itself just seems insane.
We don’t live in a world of black or white, but things do seem dark gray when incidents like this happen and we simply move on. Collateral damage? Good grief. We don’t live in world of blue and red, it’s various shades of purple nationwide, so get used to it. We don’t seem to be doing too well in basic civics these days (P.S.- teach it in school), as we hunker down in a world where we rationalize via ethics of convenience- whatever works for my world, even if it seems to contradict some basic rules of order. My world, my view, my needs, my tribe, my 401(k), my fears. My goodness…
New York Times columnist extraordinaire, Frank Bruni, recently wrote about current American politics and its wave of “moral elasticity”. So just how far are we willing to stretch? Pretty far, it seems, on far too many issues. As the pall lifts from COVID, we shift away (hopefully) from an airborne pandemic which caused understandable safety concerns and paranoia as we witness heartbreak in America, where hard-fought freedoms so valued by so many get tested on a weekly basis. And we shrug.
I’m so sorry, Highland Park.
Think about it…