I found myself thinking about the Holocaust this week as
I watched the U.S. Senate allow a minority of its membership to filibuster the
background check for gun sales bill. Polls report that 90% of Americans now
favor such measures. Worse yet, it was a minimalist bill lacking the provisions
for the return to a ban on automatic weapons and ammunition and mental health
restrictions that polls say 2/3 of Americans also favor.
This vote occurred in the wake of the Newtown massacre
where 26 elementary school children and their teachers were slaughtered by a
disturbed young man bearing legally procured weapons, his mother being the
first victim of the rampage. Rachel Maddow’s opening comment on her show that
night went straight to the heart of the matter:
The
U.S. Senate’s response to Newtown was to do exactly nothing.
Remembering
Every Child Lost
As I sifted through my shock, anger and grief over the
failure of the Senate to act in the face of this clear and present danger, I found
myself thinking about my visit to Israel in 1994. The Yad Vashem memorial outside
of Jerusalem is dedicated to the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust
(another six million coming from homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah’s witnesses and
a wide range of other groups designated less than fully human).
The most moving portion of Yad Vashem is the children’s
memorial. One million of the six million Jews systematically killed by the
Third Reich and its cowering collaborators in Nazi-held lands were children. In
the children’s memorial, one enters a dark hallway surrounded by glass walls within
which a candle is burning. The names of the children, their ages and their
towns are holographically projected onto the walls as they are simultaneously
recited over the public address system. The realization of the scale of this
tragedy as one gropes along in the darkness can touch even the most hardened
human being to the absolute depth of the soul.
But the slaughtered children of Judaism have not been
forgotten. The response to their deaths has been a fierce determination to
provide a safe place for Jewish children in Israel and to insure that the
threat of their destruction which nearly was realized during the Third Reich
can never become a possibility again. And at Yad Vashem, the response has been
to make sure that every single one of its slaughtered children are remembered
by name.
How very different the U.S. Senate’s response this past
week to the wanton and systematic slaughter of our own children.
Worshipping
a Bloodthirsty Idol
20th CE Protestant theologian Paul Tillich has
offered a definition of religion as that which is one’s ultimate concern. So
what was the ultimate concern of the U.S. Senate last week? Clearly reelection
was high on that list. It is the embodiment of the idols of power, privilege
and status. But I suspect there is another ultimate concern which lurks in the
shadows here.
The discussions of guns inevitably turns on the concerns
of pre-conventional moral reasoning – fear of others and the pursuit of
individualistic rights to the exclusion of - and sometimes at the expense of - all
else. Pre-conventional reasoning routinely demonstrates the inability or the
unwillingness to escape the lens of self to honor obligations to others that
even the lowest levels of conventional reason understand as simply one’s duty.
While the rhetoric of the opponents of even the most minimal gun laws often
turns on self-serving fantasies of bravado with the men in white gunning down
the bad guys in black before they can harm others, the ultimate focus of all
such pre-conventional constructions is always the self.
The practice of any form of idolatry almost inevitably demands
sacrifice. And the sacrifice to the bloodthirsty idol of guns has been ongoing
and consistent for many years now in places with names like Columbine, Aurora,
Tucson, Blacksburg and now Newtown. There are many more places with names which
we’ve never known because they occur in inner city neighborhoods where the
countless victims of drive-by shooting and gang turf wars have long since been
deemed by our media to be expectable if not normal. The fact that their victims
are almost always people of color living in poverty often warrants their deaths
as unworthy of major media attention. Over 3000 more victims of the American addiction
to the weapons of war have been recorded in the four months since the Newtown
Massacre.
For the most part, the governments of the nations
conquered by the Third Reich stood by silently as the Reich carried out its
deadly genocide that would ultimately claim a million Jewish children. Some
actively collaborated in the genocide, liquidating ghettoes and rounding up
their residents for one-way train rides to places with names like Auschwitz. In
a similar vein, while the Senate chose to do nothing in the wake of Newtown, a
number of states have passed laws permitting guns on school campuses and in
public places such as churches. They have chosen to become collaborators in the
carnage.
But not everyone under the domination of the Fuhrer collaborated or stood by silently. Some
chose to resist, creating underground networks, resisting churches, hiding the
targets of genocide in their own homes and businesses. Often the cost of such resistance
was high, resisters often sharing the same fate as those they sought to
protect.
Similarly, some states like Connecticut, still reeling
from the massacre of its children last December, have refused to silently
acquiesce to the reign of death in their schools, churches and theaters. They have
begun to pass the minimalist laws that the Senate refused to even bring to a
vote and more. No doubt, their leaders may pay a heavy price at election time from
the gun lobby and the corporate interests which have long since supplanted the citizens
who remain in the National Rifle Association.
In
the Presence of Bleeding Children
One of the most striking statements made by
post-Holocaust theologians was offered by Irving Greenberg. In his essay "Judaism,
Christianity, and Partnership After the Twentieth Century" (from Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tivka
Frymer-Kensky, NY: Basic Books, 2002), Greenberg attempts to create a context in
which the Holocaust can be discussed without succumbing to the almost
inevitable temptation to cast the discussion in such abstract terms that its
true horror cannot be clearly seen. Greenberg thus offers the following:
The
Holocaust confronts us with unanswerable questions. But let us agree to one
principle: no statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would
not be credible in the presence of the burning children.
This is a principle that the U.S. Senate and the
countless talking heads across America could well consider in the ongoing
discussions of gun violence. To paraphrase Greenberg, the principle would read
like this:
No statement
about guns - ideological or otherwise - should be made that would not be
credible in the presence of bleeding children.
This is merely a beginning place for a serious discussion
about America’s deadly addiction to guns. But like the million children
slaughtered by the Holocaust, the children of Newtown and the many others whose
lives have met untimely ends due to America’s absolute refusal to come to grips
with this crippling addiction deserve nothing less.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The
Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
If the unexamined life is not worth living,
surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth
holding.
Most
things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
