Why America Needs to Stop Running, Stop Hiding, and Start Fighting
Gilroy — El Paso — Dayton.
Three massive shootings. This week.
When preparing for an active shooter situation, the advice you’ll always get is Run, Hide, Fight. It’s a framework for survival.
As a nation, we’ve tried running from our gun violence problems. After Columbine, we ran to any explanation we could think of: it was the music they listened to, or the video games they played. That sure as hell didn’t work.
Then America tried hiding from the problem: we hid behind Thoughts and Prayers. We hid behind “now isn’t the time to politicize the dead” and “all we need is more good guys.” We hid behind general public malaise and desensisitivity. We hid behind NRA money and Fox News platitudes.
We hid behind the bodies of dead 2nd graders; we hid behind the bodies of country music fans — of nightclub attendees — of college students — of church goers — and of mall patrons.
We hid behind the tears of the grieving families on the news who gave us a means to compartmentalize the pain and show empathy without actually doing a single fucking thing to prevent another parent from having to go in front of the cameras next time.
We’ve already forgotten about most of the 200+ mass shootings we’ve had just this year, all so we can pop our heads out of cover to think and pray for this one.
Clearly hiding isn’t working well for us.
Now it’s time to fight. If we are to ever survive this scourge, it’s going to mean fighting for our very lives.
I’m not talking riots in the streets — I’m talking wholesale societal pushback on every empty set of thoughts and prayers; on every “now isn’t the time;” on every single person you know who refuses to act and advocate in the face scores of dead men, women, and children.
If your candidate of choice in 2020 for EVERY Federal, State and Local office on the ballot doesn’t have a clear and public goal of gun reform, find a new candidate. If your friends or family believe in the mythical “good guy with a gun” remind them that El Paso and Dayton are in two of the MOST gun friendly states in the union, while the Gilroy shooter bought his legally in Nevada.
It’s time to just stop accepting shit arguments and allowing the absolutely spineless Congressional Republicans to avoid ownership of their cowardly President and their collective problem with white supremacist enablement and gun policy inaction.
If the Republicans in your life want a better, safer America — if they want that shining city on the hill — they will join us in finding new and meaningful ways to address this cancer in our society. If they don’t, it’s time for them to be forced aside and let someone else show them what American greatness actually is. We don’t have to live this way.
No more running. No more hiding. It’s time to fight.
Vote Blue, make your voice heard wide, and never take “it’s not the right time” for an answer.