American Exceptionalism

It’s a measure of our society that we grieve as a nation when just six people are murdered and 14 others are injured on an otherwise normal Saturday morning.

How quaint. How extraordinary. How exceptional, when across the world life seemingly goes easily on when dozens, even hundreds, are killed daily in barbaric ways. Mass deaths have become matter of fact in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan and places we couldn’t find on a map if we were given their exact longitudes and latitudes.

Just six people died in Tucson. Not a famous person among them, though federal judge John M. Roll did have an important job, albeit no longer as full of potential as the life that Christine Taylor Green had ahead of her.

Of course, it is not the deaths but the attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that has transformed evil into an act of domestic terrorism, an assault on our national image as a country that settles disputes at the ballot box and not on the firing range.

But it was the random, senseless death of Christina that wrenched our emotions. It would take a heartless person indeed not to mist up at the thought of a life snuffed out so prematurely after just nine years. You would have to be an automaton not to choke up, as President Obama did, when recalling her accomplishments and joy in participating in the everyday cycle of activities that compose a child’s existence—school, Little League, climbing a tree, playing make believe. It was only when she stepped across the threshold into the adult world that she became a victim of our demons.

Americans like to think we are better than the rest of the world, that we place a higher value on life than other cultures. Each soul is more worthy of grace here in the U.S. than in countries that glorify suicide bombers with sex-laden trips to heaven.

In truth, we respect our fellow man, woman and child only in the aftermath of tragedy. We cut corners to make a profit. Mine safety, for example, is too often overlooked until miners are trapped or entombed underground; food processing workers toil in unsanitary conditions, their hazardous output shipped to an unsuspecting consuming public; oil platforms are planted in waters without adequate safeguards for the crews who work them, the sea life surrounding them and the millions who live and work on the shores nearby.

Americans care more for spectacle than prevention. A symbolic funeral, a national catharsis, then back to normalcy.

How is it that a person kicked out of community college for aberrant behavior, a person rejected by the military, a person with known anti-social tendencies, can easily and legally purchase a gun? How is it that we allow any person to legally buy large capacity bullet clips that have no real purpose other than to mutate ordinary guns into killing machines? Can we honestly say we value life more than other nations when some 30,000 Americans every year are killed by guns and thousands more are wounded?

Our gun-loving ethos surely is a dark side of American exceptionalism.