"Friday marks one year since nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, were murdered. The congregants, including the church’s pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, had welcomed the killer, Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, into their bible study, and prayed with him, before he opened fire. After the massacre, the family members of the slain men and women, in the throes of unimaginable grief, offered radical forgiveness to Roof. “You took something very precious away from me,” one relative said, addressing Roof during a court hearing. “But I forgive you.”
At Reverend Pinckney’s funeral, President Obama delivered a stirring tribute, and called on the American public to not “slip into comfortable silence, once the eulogies have been delivered, once the television cameras are gone.” Most memorably, Obama sang “Amazing Grace,” reminding Americans that “out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for He has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind…. He’s given us the chance where we’ve been lost to find our best selves.”
This past weekend, another terrible tragedy struck, this time in Orlando. Like the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, Pulse night club was a sanctuary for a community, violated by an act of hate. Coming so close to the one-year anniversary of Charleston, Orlando is a tragic and sobering reminder that we are still lost, and have yet to find those best selves. How can we find our way? Efforts at gun control have stalled in Congress, and Americans have grown increasingly weary. Most Americans support measures like universal background checks, preventing people on the no-fly list from purchasing firearms, and bans on assault weapons. But despite the popularity of these proposals, and despite the fact that Americans are now as likely to die from a gunshot as they are to die in a car accident, politicians have refused to act.
On Tuesday night, Representative Jim Himes, of Connecticut, along with several other Democrats, walked out of the House of Representatives during a moment of silence for the Orlando victims. Silence, Himes argued, was not what the nation needed. “Screaming at painful volume the names of the forty-nine whose bodies were ripped apart in Orlando, and the previous victims and the ones before them” would be a much better way to honor the dead, Himes argued.
Our country needs changes, both cultural and legislative."
Charleston and America, One Year Later - The New Yorker
No comments:
Post a Comment