"Don't Politicize Tragedies": But Orlando Was Political

By Zack Boehm on June 14, 2016

There is a disturbing rhetorical trend that emerges, like clockwork, in the wake of mass shootings like the one in Orlando last weekend. As families grieve and the nation unites in mourning, as we grasp for unknowable explanations for unthinkable violence, as the world comes together to honor the victims who were cruelly and unjustly robbed of their life, a pious few will take to their keyboards and implore us not to “politicize the tragedy”.

via AP

These people would have you believe that craven acts of violence like the one perpetrated in Orlando are complete aberrations. These people would have you believe that these mass shootings are precipitated by nothing, except maybe the shooters own murderous psychoses. That they certainly don’t reflect any significant defects in our national politics. These people would have you believe that these mass killings, where gunmen equipped with an arsenal of military grade weapons indiscriminately slaughter scores of our friends and neighbors, are a fact of life in modern America.

These people are wrong.

We as the citizens of the United States constitute the body politic. We as a body politic are responsible for electing representatives who craft legislation and provide philosophical leadership. We’re responsible for defining our cultural and political norms, for holding institutions accountable, and for demanding that demonstrably ineffectual policy be changed and improved. Our society was not divinely created and bequeathed to us in its perfected state. It was forged, and continues to be forged, by deliberate decisions, by legislation, elections, activism, amendments, conflict, and conciliation. It was created in the crucible of political action.

We, the body politic, create our society. And we, the body politic, created a society that failed the victims in Orlando.

We created a society that says it’s okay for a violent, psychologically imbalanced man, a man who had been the subject of federal investigation for his expressed identification with terrorist groups, to purchase weapons designed not for innocent sport or for culturally significant hunting practices, but for killing massive amounts of people with brutal, calculated efficiency.

We have created a society that continues to sanction the overt discrimination of queer people under such dubious guises as “religious liberty”. We have created a society where LGBT people must not only fear violence from deranged bigots, but also persecution from the state. We have given license to the treatment of LGBT people as foreign others instead of fellow citizens. It is impossible for queer folk to feel safe in this country, and we have only ourselves to blame.

And these things, each one of them, were accomplished politically.

via cbsnews.com

It is political organizations like the NRA who halt the progression of even the most moderate gun control measures at all costs. It’s been a series of political decisions that have continued to prevent the CDC from even researching possible solutions to America’s gun violence pathology. The Anti-LGBT laws in North Carolina, Texas, and Georgia didn’t materialize out of thin air, rather they were the product of concerted political effort. They reflect a horrifying history of American political marginalization of LGBT people, a marginalization that has all but permitted a culture of rampant and too often violent homophobia in our country.

To sanctimoniously demand that people not politicize the tragedy is not just misguided, it’s morally reprehensible. It is a cowardly attempt at personal exculpation, a spineless ploy to deflect the blame that all of us bear for the suffering of the victims and their families. Often times the people who are admonishing us from their ivory twitter towers to remain apolitical are the very same people whose politics helped lay the groundwork for the possibility of this kind of tragedy in the first place. Apparently politics are fine when obdurately impeding gun violence research or when institutionalizing the discrimination of LGBT people, but when 50 innocent people at a bar that celebrates LGBT empowerment are slaughtered by a man wielding a legally purchased military grade assault rifle, politics should be left at the door.

I did not personally know anybody who was killed at Pulse, and I am not a gay American, so I can never claim to fully understand the horror that this mindless violence must provoke. But I am an Orlando resident, so I know that the scars in our city are deep. I know that the sense of grief and fear are overwhelming. I know that the loss is profound. But so was the response. So was the heroism of the first responders. So was the outpouring of love and support from people who traveled from miles around to donate blood and offer services. So was the steadfast unity with which we met this attack.

When you tell us not to politicize the tragedy, you tell us that there is nothing we can do politically to prevent this from happening in the future. You tell us that we are powerless, that we must resign ourselves as a city, and as a nation, to the inevitability of similar acts of brutality in the future. You tell us that this is a fact of life in modern America, and I can’t accept that.

Orlando was political, and its response must be as well.

via downtownorlando.com

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