Dear Governor Ducey,
I’m not entirely sure what your stance on gun control and
the NRA is, but, since you side with the rightiest right on public education
(we should get rid of it) and private incarceration (we should do more of it),
I assume you believe that the second amendment guarantees your individual right
to have as many guns as you can get, no matter what you want to do with them.
Although that reading of the Second Amendment is much disputed (and can be
further disputed, get to work, we non-righty rights), that reading is how you
wrap yourself up in your beliefs when another school shooting happens and say
things like Jeb Bush said, “stuff happens.” Shrug your shoulders. Pet your gun.
In Mockingjay, the third film based on The Hunger Games
series by Suzanne Collins, the president of District 13 and the leader of the
rebellion against the capital, notes that freedom comes with a price. We see
citizens of other districts pay that price. Loggers, taken to their cutting
trees by security forces start to run. The forces shoot at them. Many die but many other climb into the
treetops to escape the landmines that kill the capital’s security guards. In
District 5, men and women carry explosives in large wooden boxes toward men
guarding a hydroelectric dam. When the guards kill the men on the front lines
and drop the box, the people behind pick up the box. They charge the guards,
make it inside the doors. The people run out. The bombs go off. The dam breaks.
The capital loses power. The revolution gains traction.
The Hunger Games is a distinctly American movie. Revolution
is all to the good. It’s the Revolutionary War kind of revolution, not the
Cultural Revolution or the Russian Revolution, where we remember the
right-deprived, the starving, the dead. The Revolutionary War was the
revolution that worked out, in our self-congratulating cultural memory, in the
end, happy for everyone, even those who died battering down dams or standing up
to the king’s redcoats.
Gun advocates wrap themselves in this belief: that freedom
comes with a price. It doesn’t matter who pays it, even if it’s a six-year old
in kindergarten, a six-year old at the wrong end of his brother’s playacting, a
six-year old at the movie theater, a six-year old wondering what this dark,
metal tunnel is that weighs so much in his hand. Six year olds like to push
buttons and a trigger is just a more effective button.
When the dam breaks in Mockingjay, I tear up. YES! We must
fight.
One of the subtle elements of Mockingjay is that everyone
uses propaganda. Even the ‘good guys.’ Even the filmmaker. I am crying for a
revolution that does not even exist. Set ‘freedom’ to music.
But, I would like to ask the gun-must-havers, what
revolution are you fighting? The revolutionary war was over long ago. The
redcoats went back to England. A revolution requires two things: an ‘us’ and a
‘them.’ We are a country. We are only an ‘us.’ The only ‘them’ is the six-year
old that didn’t know he was a solider in a war that doesn’t exist.