Oh, The National Myths We Tell Ourselves

I have asked Jan Linn, a retired Pastor and Professor, for permission to run his blog in my usual space. Think about what he has to say!

Charles Bayer

Oh, The National Myths We Tell Ourselves

Let’s be honest.

We all know that nothing is going to change regarding our nation’s gun laws because of the tragedy in Las Vegas. We also know the reason why. Republicans in Congress will make sure of it, just as they did in 2012 after 20 children and 6 adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. That said it all…not even mass shootings have sufficient moral persuasion to get Republicans to do what is right.

Yet the core issue we face in this country is not lax gun laws per se, or even mass shootings, as horrific as they are. The fundamental issue mass shootings like Las Vegas expose is the culture of violence prevalent here in America. We ignore this culture of violence as if it is the invention of liberals who want to take people’s guns away from them. But the evidence is indisputable. We are the most violent society among Western nations and we are the only one with no serious gun laws.

To deny the connection is to suggest that individual Americans are just more deranged than people in other countries, that our problem is not guns, but having more than our share of crazy people who do bad things with guns before good people with guns can stop them. Apparently that is what Republicans and the voters who support them believe about our country.

I suggest, on the other hand, that the more sane assessment of our nation is that we are a culture of violence that is rooted in the unregulated buying and selling of guns. At the very least it is a serious possibility, but most conservatives refuse to consider it. Or perhaps they simply believe that the possible connection between guns and violence is the price we have to pay to protect the right to gun ownership. Even conservatives on the Supreme Court don’t want to connect the dots between a nation with millions of guns and a nation that has more gun shootings than any civilized country in the world.

I believe at the heart of our refusal to connect those dots is our penchant as a nation for myth making. We have created national myths that have convinced us we are different (better?) from people in other countries, that we are the greatest nation on earth, the last best hope for humankind, the envy of the world, the most advanced, second to none in anything. It’s as if we are convinced that when we believe myths they are transformed into truth, and anyone who doesn’t believe them is unpatriotic or nothing more than a liberal critic who always blames America first.

During the Viet Nam War the myths about our country were so powerful that when four college students were shot and killed by the National Guard at Kent State University, 58% of Americans blamed the students for their own deaths. Those myths also led to uncritical support for our government to persist in that useless and tragic war until it took 58,318 lives of young American soldiers, most of whom were draftees, and left thousands more wounded physically and emotionally. Learning nothing from our past mistakes, the American people gave wholehearted support to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, both built on the myth that we would be welcomed as liberators.

Fifteen years later we are still fighting those wars, proving the lie that myth really was.

As a nation we seem to have turned myth making into a fine art, which is why I think something a Canadian lawyer said about us I quoted months ago bears repeating here. “Americans,” he said, “have a long way to go to become the people many of them think they already are.”

That is the myth of all national myths, and in the end is why even after Las Vegas, nothing will be different, nothing will change, nothing will be done to confront the culture of violence that is who we truly are.