Guns, Wombs, and Grief
“Feels like the NRA et al have won the war on guns, since none of my threads or groups are talking about Michigan at all,” one of my friends wrote on Facebook on Wednesday, a day after a 15-year-old shot and killed four students and injured seven other people, including a teacher, in a suburban Detroit high school.
“The righteous fury is just sadness now … after 22 years of the same cycle,” someone responded.
Indeed. It’s been that kind of a week. And month. And year. So much that we once took for certain — from sending our kids to school without fear, to breathing freely with friends and family, to reproductive choice, to democracy and a livable planet — is now shrouded in uncertainty. Which is why at times it feels that any public expression of grief or outrage at yet another senseless, and preventable, act of violence would be performative at best. Same goes with how many of us, especially women, are feeling right now about yet another legal assault on women’s bodies that we saw play out in the US Supreme Court this week.
Apart from the basic fact that we are all members of society and what happens in the world affects us all, both these issues, as you may know, are of concern to environmentalists as well. Studies have shown that increasing global temperatures will cause a rise in violent crime (see here and here), including gun violence is the US, which currently has at least 330 million guns in circulation. There have been at least 25 mass shootings in the US this year. Meanwhile, women’s access to reproductive choice, which is also threatened by climate change, is key at a time when so many young folks are grappling with the question of whether or not to bring new life into a rapidly-warming world.
These aren’t the best of times, and yes, many of us are feeling so stretched thin that even speaking up feels like a huge effort. Perhaps, as author Kathleen Dean Moore wrote in this beautiful essay, the way forward lies in accepting “sorrow as a last great offering from a desperate world” and then shaping “anguish into something that is fierce enough to stand in defense of all we love too much to lose.”
Maureen Nandini Mitra
Editor, Earth Island Journal
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Photo: Franck Fauveau
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