America is a dangerous place. From talk radio to Fox News, the airwaves are laden with violent rhetoric and vile smear campaigns. Politics are rife with insults and faux outrage. Televisions and movie screens broadcast endless images and sounds of death and destruction, borne of a sexual repression that binds and frustrates their viewers, at once dulling their senses and riling them up into indignant rages.
In this culture of violence and hate, Randy Gardner has seen the reality of the right wing’s rage on the rest of the country. As a survivor of the Kent State massacre, student Gardner thought he had weathered the worst of what a conservative country could throw at him. Then last week, he faced another horror as a madman gunned down fellow Democratic supporters, taking six of those lives and injuring 13, Gardner included.
It’s a wonder Gardner has remained sane, considering the fate of fellow victim, Eric Fuller. Kent State was a turning point in the history of the US or it should have been. While the horror of that day lives on in our culture with its image of the girl gesturing in grief over a dying body, it has not fared as well in the mind, morality or conscience of the country. Its lessons certainly have been forgotten.
It must shake Gardner to his soul to see his country gripped, from 1970′s Kent State to Tuscon in 2011, by a madness for guns, their symbolism of compensated impotence never so indelible as it is today in Sarah Palin’s America.
Slowly it is dawning on him that the scope of last Saturday’s events might be as large as the Kent State shootings. If he considered himself lucky then, he considers himself lucky now.
His injuries will heal, he said. The crutches will soon be unnecessary, the cast shed. He and Hanna have no plans to change their routines or beliefs.
“We won’t be scared,” said Hanna, 67, a retired psychiatric nurse who is similarly politically minded. “We’re not going to start carrying guns.”
But what Gardner continues to be troubled by most are reports of killings he hears in the news every day: The homicides, the robberies gone awry.
He held up his thumbs and index fingers to form a 2-inch square.
“They’re going to get a little piece in the paper that they got shot,” he said. They would never get to meet the president, as he and Hanna had been able to on Wednesday night. Gardner can’t understand why this sort of everyday violence doesn’t attract the same outrage: “It’s that acceptance that’s always bothered me through the years.”
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A lot of global citizens are concerned that Muslims urging the kind of violent retaliation Palin wished on her political opponents would have been jailed before they had the opportunity to target incumbent Congress people with gun sights. In the name of equal justice, there is a petition at http://www.PetitionOnline.com/IndictSP/petition.html – which calls for the Dept of Justice to indict Palin for incitement to violence.