You Say You Love This Country. I Say You Don’t!
What happened Thursday in Tennessee is the proof.
“I caught a glimpse of this type of natural selection at work one December afternoon at Wilbur Cross High in New Haven [Connecticut]. I was sitting in a second floor classroom talking to a social studies teacher. School was just letting out. A series of sharp pops erupted outside and we looked out the window and saw two cars parked at odd angles in the street. The boys inside the cars — at least three of them turned out to be Wilbur Cross students — were firing pistols at each other. Students were running diving behind hedges and snowbanks. One of the cars started backing up very fast, then roared off, up a side street. The other car squealed away in another direction. The scene had a heavy panic-edged quality as people began to pick themselves up and look around to see who, if anyone, had been hit. Nobody seemed to be hurt. But then the car that left by the side street — a large, muddy, dark blue Buick– came barreling back out…in front of the school. People began to run again as the Buick lurched around, bumped over the curb and then sped off in the direction the other car had taken. That was the end of the excitement….”
~ William Finnegan, Cold New World: Growing Up In A Harder Country (1998)
I was staring down at this very scene, in real-time, from a third-floor classroom window at Wilbur Cross High School that day until I was pushed to the floor and away from harm by a friend. He and I talked about this nearly 30 years later. There we were, just one floor above the author of that book passage. It was 1990. I was 16 years old. And I’d never been so scared in my whole life. Never did I imagine that we’d still be here almost 33 years later, inflicting the same trauma on our kids. But here we are.
What unfolded at the Tennessee Statehouse on Thursday, April 7, 2023, made me angry in a way that I can’t really describe. What I saw, what we all saw, was a show of disrespect, it was a show of racism, and it was a show of cowardice. The expulsion of two Black legislators, State Representatives Justin Jones and Justin J. Pearson, took precedence over protecting Tennessee’s children from gun violence. This was just one week after a mass shooter entered The Covenant School, a private Christian school in Nashville, to murder three children and three adults before law enforcement stepped in and took them out. It was an act of bravery 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde were not afforded a year ago.
Perhaps I was so angry because of my connection to Tennessee and to Nashville. Like Justin Jones, I went to Fisk Univerity. While I was there, I did an internship at the NAACP working on labor discrimination cases. Once, on a date at Opryland Hotel, I got followed by Klansman. Everywhere we went, there he was, red-faced, wearing a symbol of hate on his shirt while peering behind columns and plants as my date and I walked the hotel, having a good time. While in Nashville, I also learned the history of Fisk alum who led the 1960 sit-in movement. John Lewis, Diane Nash, and James Bevel were leading a revolution as young adults and changed the course of history in that city. I was at a race relations conference there when we got the news that James Byrd, Jr. had been murdered by white supremacists in Jasper, Texas. See, I know the rights that people fought and died for, yet I am still perplexed as to why Tennessee’s Republican legislators want to die on this particular hill when the majority of the state’s students want the right to live.
I remember boys I went to school with who didn’t have dreams about what they wanted to do when they grew up — they just wanted to live to see the next day. Kids now want the same thing. So I don’t understand how politicians with the power to ensure them more days on this earth think the sacrifice of young lives is worth their desire to own an AR-15. If you think having sensible gun laws to protect children is a bigger sacrifice than the slaughter of nine-year-olds in Nashville or six-year-olds in my state of Connecticut, you have a bigger problem than just so-called “wokeness.” You have a perversion of consciousness. But keep calling Democrats the perverts. Let’s not talk about grooming because you are the ones who do that every day to the people who depend on you to protect them. You groom them to look the other way and find comfort in having nothing. And before you tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about, sit down, shut up, and listen to commonsense for once instead of political talking points.
You say you love your guns, well I love my life, and so do all of these kids who are looking for you to make the laws to protect that life. You are pro-life, but only as long as it is in the womb.
You say you love the police, but only when they are killing Black and Brown folks. When they do their job and have to hold you accountable, you want to defund and investigate them. Yet you ran a whole campaign against “defund the police” when it was Democrats calling for justice in policing. And you raised a lot of money on that issue.
You say you love the military until they come home and ask for the services they are entitled to. You say you love the 9/11 first responders until they ask you to continue to fund their healthcare because saving so many of you is costing many their lives from breathing in toxic fumes and dust day after day for months on end, cleaning up the aftermath of terrorism and removing the bodies of the victims of that terrorism 20 years ago. Many of those bodies were in parts, and you won’t fund their mental healthcare because of “fiscal conservatism.” Yet, you wrap yourselves in your flags (which is desecration, but that’s a whole other topic of discussion) and buy more of your guns, and hate a whole religion because of a few. Still, you won’t accept or acknowledge what your ancestors did to every racial minority in this country because you, yourself, didn’t do it. And ironically, you say you love teachers, but only as long as they are hiding that shameful history from your children and grandchildren, who may find a picture of you being a racist, doing racist things in books — which you also are trying to get rid of.
You say you love this country. I say you don’t! Because if you did, you would love ALL of its people, full stop. But you hate everyone, and I have to ask, do you even love your own children? Because you fail to protect all children and somehow believe yours could never possibly be a victim of gun violence. Guns don’t know who you are. We are all anonymous when it comes to gunfire, and bullets are equal opportunity executors. God forbid you ever have to suffer this fate. I really pray for you that you don’t. But if the unthinkable happens, what do you tell your dead child? Because there are parents who have to look in the coffins of their dead babies and explain to them that they are no longer here because you, the people who represent them, did absolutely nothing to protect them. At this point, it’s clear. You stand for nothing, and you fail everyone — including your own children.
It is a sad state of affairs, really, that your constituents are so eager to “own the libs” they can’t see it. They are so consumed with grievance, hatred, and self-victimization that they don’t realize you only care about their votes, not them. You have made your voters so fiercely sycophantic that they don’t understand their loyalty to you and to Trump ends at the doors of Trump Tower. Because even he wouldn’t ever let them inside. But you go on TV crying like that gutless Lindsey Graham, begging them to send a self-proclaimed billionaire a dollar or five. But you know, because you refuse to legislate, they can’t afford shoes for their kids or food on their tables. You know that they hate the people you hate. And that is enough. To quote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech following the Selma to Montgomery march, “The southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow.” You let them feast on a steady diet of Jim Crow and feed it to their offspring through generational poverty. Because you know it works. Everyone knows poverty makes people angry, unhappy, and so starved for sustenance they will take anything you feed them. Even if it is nothing more than a heaping pile of bullshit.
And that’s what all of this is: Bullshit. And you know it.
You may be proud of yourselves today, but Justin Jones is a Fiskite. From The Jubilee Singers to W.E.B. Dubois to John Lewis and Diane Nash to my C3 wing of Shane Hall from 1996–1998 to Justin Jones, we’re winners! What you don’t know is that when you’re HBCU strong, you never go wrong. So they’ll be back. Both Justin Jones and Justin Pearson will be back because the people who voted them in will not be denied.
On days like this, when I feel I can’t fight another day, I am reminded that, in the end, we all will face judgment. And the line for entry into hell is getting long. But don’t you worry. With your decisions yesterday, and in this day and time, you’ve already secured a reservation. Enjoy your stay!
“Welcome to America, hope and change. Everything takes forever, and truth is a new minority.” ~Prince
