Let's find the courage to speak up

I’m searching for new words.

In addition to the gruesome attacks that killed 30 and injured 52 in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, there were three other mass shootings this past weekend. Two in Chicago and one in Memphis.

That’s five acts of domestic terror in one weekend, perpetrated by American citizens, all of them men.

I’m searching for new explanations, for new insights that will move us from anguish to action.

Someone once said to me if you can articulate the problem, you’re halfway to solving it. Have we named the problem?

We have decades of data and centuries of experience under our belts. We’ve named the conditions that allow for this level of violence. We’ve articulated the correlation between guns and gun deaths. We’ve identified the weapons of choice. There are as many evidence-based policy remedies out there as the day is long and yet, we refuse to act.

Just this week, the Washington Post mined data about perpetrators of mass shootings dating all the way back to 1966, offering up four common characteristics among the them: Most shooters are victims of early childhood trauma and most experience an identifiable crisis shortly before opening fire. Most of them are tied to a community (online and otherwise) that provides the narrative, script, and validation for carrying out an attack. And finally, they all have access to guns and the means to carry out their plans.

Each one of these indicators demand a policy response, to be sure. We can’t ignore the abominable rates of early childhood trauma in our country. We must legislate and enforce common sense gun laws. And we must disrupt the cycle of validation shooters find online and vote out officials that feed those narratives of hate.

These are all true articulations of the realities of violence in this country, but we still haven’t named what is broken.

I just finished reading Colson Whitehead’s award-winning novel, “The Underground Railroad,” and in the reading became even more convicted that the problem of gun violence in this country is a symptom of culture that refuses to name what truly ails us:

White supremacy and its attendants, misogyny and bigotry, are our history and our present.

They are the perverse manifestations of the human desire for power — perverse because that power is derived by subjugating others.

We know that the seeds of violence are sown in the heart and mind before their expression makes it to the trigger. The seeds of violence we see today were planted long ago at the founding of our nation and we have yet to remove the roots.

As a country, we haven’t articulated the problem. I know this because the most basic, the elementary step we could take in this moment is to remove Donald Trump from office and any other elected official who leads with abusive, supremacist rhetoric.

And we haven’t done that. We haven’t named the problem because the symptoms of it still sit in the White House.

We can’t seriously address what is broken if we don’t hold our leaders accountable to upholding liberty and justice for all and we can’t pass meaningful gun reform without also reforming the status quo, which normalizes greed and violence as pathways to power.

The shooters in El Paso, Dayton, Chicago, and Memphis this weekend probably wouldn’t trace their origins so far back — to the removal of Native Americans, to slavery or Jim Crow or to the subjugation of women — but they are the children of a culture that validates their means to an end, and that end is preservation of power.

As a new school year begins, I turn back to the ritual of letting go of my children every morning: I turn on the lights and rouse them with a song. From the kitchen I urge them to brush their teeth and put on appropriate clothes for the day and then help them search for the other shoe.

I kiss their round cheeks before releasing them into a world that is at war with itself.

As I head to work, I wonder if my girls will see meaningful change in their lifetimes — if they will see many women pass through the Oval Office or serve on the County Commission. I wonder if they will experience reproductive healthcare as a matter of course and if they will find friendships across borders, cultures and belief systems.

I wonder if their personhood and dignity will be valued.

We have to name these things in order to change course. Let’s find the words and the courage to speak up.

Whitney Kimball Coe is an Athens resident who serves as coordinator of the National Rural Assembly and director of national programs for the Center for Rural Strategies. She can be reached at whitneykcoe@gmail.com