“I want you to know this is not Poway,” Steve Vaus, the mayor of Poway, Calif., told reporters shortly after a 19-year-old man walked into the Chabad of Poway synagogue and shot and killed one person and wounded three others.
It was a plea we have heard from mayors and ordinary citizens across the country whose communities have been devastated by violence so gross that it broke the heart of a nation.
This is not Poway. This is not Parkland. This is not Charleston. This is not Sutherland Springs.
“People who live in (fill in the blank) would not walk into a house of worship or a school or a movie theater or a concert and indiscriminately kill innocent people. This is not who we are.”
It is not who they are.
But it is who we are.
John Earnest, Dylann Roof, Adam Lanza, Devin Patrick Kelley and Tristyn Andrew Terrell were not terrorists from some country bent on doing us harm. They were not extremists who were warped by twisted versions of Islam. They were young white men who went to our churches, played on our playgrounds and educated in our schools. They are the products of our culture...
...This is ours to deal with.
We must think more clearly than the legislators in Florida who recently passed a law allowing teachers to bring guns to class, a superficial and potentially deadly idea supported by the National Rifle Association.
The issues are deeper, more profound and complex, going to the very roots of American culture: the values we live by rather than the ones we profess; the dangerous ideas we allow to go unchallenged and unchecked; the way we shape our boys and young men.
To paraphrase Peele, the pastor, the minister of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Poway and Earnest’s pastor: We can’t pretend that we don’t have some responsibility. The shooters were radicalized in our communities, churches, schools and neighborhoods.
There is something deeply wrong in our culture. Until we face that painful truth, there will be no lasting change.
“Not everything faced can be changed,” said James Baldwin, a famed novelist, playwright and activist, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
