Our entire country has become a war zone
/THE BOSTON GLOBE
Beverly Beckham:
I cannot pronounce Luhansk and Lysychansk, because I have stopped watching television news. And because I no longer hear these names spoken, I don’t know how to say them.
I stopped watching the news every night because it is all calamity and conjecture interrupted by ads paid for by pharmaceutical companies, which would go bankrupt if, tomorrow morning, we all woke up well. And because the nightly news teaches me nothing I can’t learn by reading, I switched to print months ago.
Still there are the images from Ukraine: body bags piled up on roads bombed into smithereens; derailed trains; boy soldiers; people being stalked like deer; mothers clutching babies; small children holding hands; old men helping their old wives out of bombed-out buildings.
My father fought in World War II. He celebrated his 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd birthdays on battlefields throughout Africa and Europe. He did this to stop an aggressor. An estimated 400,000 Americans lost their lives in the war.
Now we watch freedom being attacked by yet another aggressor. Scenes out of the past are happening again.
It’s been nearly five months since Russia invaded Ukraine. And though the devastation continues this war no longer dominates the news. Why? Because we don’t care? Because we have short attention spans? Because the news, the war, the world, are all too much and we have no control over any of it?
The glaciers are melting, hate groups are thriving. Americans women just lost the freedom to control their own bodies. The congressional hearings into the Jan. 6 insurrection go on without end. Plus the cost of gasoline and food keeps going up, and then there’s monkeypox and new strains of COVID and airlines canceling flights and we have our own battles to fight, right?
But wouldn’t you think the war in Ukraine would keep our attention? Wouldn’t you think this brazen invasion would have united us since, like Americans, Ukrainians are just people living their lives, going to school, working, being kids, raising kids?
At another time, this war might have brought us together. But we are a divided nation that can’t solve its own problems, let alone Ukraine’s.
Maybe we have grown so used to bloodshed and carnage and civilians being gunned down in American cities and towns that the destruction of people living a half a world away doesn’t feel quite as horrific. Maybe if we weren’t so accustomed to seeing the faces of American children killed right here at home, the faces of murdered Ukrainian children would move us more.
One moment alive, the next moment dead. Children gunned down while sitting in their classrooms. Children shot while playing outside. Children targeted while sitting with their families watching a parade. Children and adults erased while they were shopping, or at a movie or a party or in a parking lot or just sitting at home. This is what we are used to in America.
Every day 321 people are shot in this country. The Brady Campaign, a violence prevention group, keeps score.
And in the United States no one is safe from this violence because our entire country, not just some of it, is a war zone.
Think about this: We live in the only country on Earth that has more civilian-owned firearms than people, bloomberg.com has reported. This is sad proof that Americans love their guns more than they love their children. Unless they are unborn children.
The fact is that if we can’t stop the bullies and the gun culture on our own soil, how can we stop a war in Ukraine? We’re good at making noise, at rattling our sabers, but we are not good at making progress. Not these days, anyway. Not here and not there.
And the rest of the world sees this.
We are a country so politically divided that we have lost our clout on the world stage. But far, far worse is that we have lost our way. We are making the wrong choices. The right to bear arms does not mean we have the right to carry weapons our founding fathers could never have imagined. Weaponry has changed. But what hasn’t changed is the promise made that all Americans have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The founding fathers went so far as to call these “unalienable” rights, which means they can never be taken away.
But the guns are taking our right to life away. It’s time they go.
