Sometimes we react badly to tragedies. This wasn’t one of those times.
We blame everyone except the criminal and we call for laws that stop everything except crimes. We demand more regulations on guns, video games, mental institutions, guns in video games, video games in mental institutions. When these laws inevitably fail to stop the next tragedy, we take it as proof that even more laws are needed.
So when a psychopath named Dylann Roof raised a gun in a Charleston church and murdered nine people, the stage was set for another harebrained and tin-eared response. The usual suspects began implicating such plausible culprits as white people and guns. The ambulance chasers laced their Asics and prepared to charge.
And then two things happened.
First, the victims set a remarkable example of grace in the face of tragedy. Confronting Roof for the first time in court, the families of the dead forgave him and asked God to have mercy on his soul. Roof may not have selected his victims because of their religion, but their response was unquestionably inspired by their Christianity. The political class’ self-involved search for a scapegoat ran headfirst into a Christian love that refused to angrily point fingers.
Second, a consensus developed around post-tragedy reforms that was sensible and broadly supported. So quickly did the Confederate battle flag fall out of fashion after the murders that, less than a week after Roof’s massacre, it’s been taken down from the Alabama state capitol, erased from Virginia state license plates, and removed from the shelves of merchandisers like Amazon, Sears, eBay, and Wal-Mart.
Perhaps most resounding of all was the vote to lower the stars and bars by the South Carolina House of Representatives — the same legislative body that once ordered delegates to a convention on secession. The House approved the motion 103-10, a groundswell of support rarely seen in our divisive politics.
One imagines wonks and economists being a bit skeptical of all this. What’s needed, they would argue, are policies, laws and regulations, carrots and sticks, accompanied by charts showing how many shooting deaths can be prevented and how many guns can be plucked off the streets. Lowering the Confederate colors must seem like an insufficient response to the empirical mind. How many deaths will be prevented by puttering around the flagpole? Isn’t a flag just a symbol?
The answers to those questions are “zero” and “yes” respectively. And that’s what remarkable about our response to Charleston. No one is being compelled to do anything, like register their guns or hand over their flags. No one is making feel-good leaps of logic, like more money for mental hospitals will somehow yield fewer mass shootings. No one is trying to vault over human nature or end evil. Instead we’ve made a prudent and consensual decision to stop romanticizing the sins of the past. We’ve put our humble heart over our ambitious head.
For once, the quote that best summarizes us post-tragedy isn’t Rahm Emanuel’s “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” It comes instead from Edmund Burke: “The people of England will not ape the fashions they have never tried, nor go back to those which they have found mischievous on trial.” Likewise, we in America will not pretend we’re an outpost of Europe where gun culture is out and technocracy is in, but neither will we be constrained by the horrors of our past. We’ve found a modest middle ground.
The challenge now is not to overstep. There’s a difference between seeing the Confederacy clearly and trying to expunge it from public life through the defacement of statues or the censorship of art. There’s a mob lurking on the fringes of this debate and we shouldn’t try to appease it.
Nevertheless, by and large, when nine people were gunned down in a church, America rejected hysteria and coercion in favor of poignancy and grace. On PBS, Rare Politics Editor Jack Hunter said the problem with Confederate flag apologists is they’re “much more worried about being right than being decent.” This week, America’s response to the Charleston killings was right precisely because it was decent.
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