Virginia Beach

Those poor people in Virginia Beach! They weren’t children. They weren’t soldiers. They weren’t young people dancing the night away in a cool nightspot. They weren’t worshipers in synagogue or people gathered in church for Bible study. Nor were they high school kids rushing from home room to their first classes of the day. In other words, they were just people—regular, grown-up, working people busily attending to their non-flashy jobs in a non-flashy office compound in a city known mostly for having a pretty beach. And now they appear actually to have met posthumous the fate that I feared—but also half-expected—would end up being theirs: front page news for a day or two, then the subject of a follow-up story buried somewhere in the back of the first section a few days later, then, depending on the newspaper and the politics of its editorial board, either forgotten entirely or followed up a couple of days after that with a human interest piece describing of some of the victim’s funerals and then allowed to sink into gun-violence oblivion.

Mass shootings are resembling more and more hurricanes in this violent land of ours: named in the first place to make it possible to keep them all straight in your mind, but mostly forgotten anyway as soon as the skies clear…other than by the people whose homes they ruined or whose livelihoods. Yes, everybody remembers Sandy…but mostly because it inflicted something like 70 billion dollars’ worth of damage. But what about Beryl, Chris, Florence, Helene, Isaac, Leslie, Michael, and Oscar—to name only Atlantic hurricanes that hit the United States in the last year? My guess is not so much. Unless you had to deal with the destruction these storms left in their wake personally, probably not so much at all!

People think about things in the abstract entirely differently than when they are asked their opinion about the very same issues not as pristine philosophical concepts but rather as nuts-and-bolts issues set into the real-life world of actual people. The most famous example, known to most from Philosophy 101 in college, is the famous “trolley-car problem.” It has a thousand different versions, but the basic concept is always that the same people who speak loftily and movingly about the inestimable value of human life—and who claim wholeheartedly to accept the corollary of that idea, namely that it is impossible (i.e., not only morally reprehensible but actually not doable) to place a specific dollar value on a specific human life—those same people when presented with the dilemma of a trolley-car driver having to choose between plowing his run-away vehicle into a crowd of thirty healthy kindergarten children or veering off to the side even though it will mean hitting a terminally ill centenarian who has just a few days left to live invariably say they would aim at the old man rather than take the lives of thirty little children. So much for the inestimable, thus uncalculatable, value of human life!

There are lots of variations. You may have heard the version featuring an individual standing next to a hugely fat man on a bridge and watching a train (not a trolley in this version for some reason) hurtling towards the thirty children. The only way to stop the train is to shove the fat man off the bridge onto the tracks below, which act will almost certainly save the children’s lives at the expense of the fat man’s. It’s basically the same situation as the one with the trolley-car conductor, yet whereas a clear majority almost always say that they would be okay about flipping the switch to save the children at the expense of the elderly sick guy, a majority almost always also say that they would not go so far as actually to shove the fat man off the bridge to accomplish exactly the same goal. (For a fascinating examination of these issues from a Jewish point of view by Tsuriel Rashi, a professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel, click here. You won’t be disappointed!)

To translate this into modern American terms is simple: we all say that we think that the loss of even a single life is tragic, but we have become so inured to gun violence in our country that we only respond viscerally when there is something particularly horrific about the incident: merely being shot to death by a maniac with a gun is nowhere near enough in today’s America to sustain the interest of the nation over more than a day or two. (Oh yeah? I heard that! Columbine is near Denver and Parkland is near Miami…but where exactly is Highlands Ranch again?)

The question, as always, is how we should respond to yet another of these incidents. I have to admit that I have trouble keeping them all straight in my head—and I’m guessing that that’s how we all feel. To militate for stricter controls on gun purchases, to insist that the government find a way to make guns useless other than in the hands of their legitimate owners (which wouldn’t have worked in Virginia Beach, since the shooter owned his guns legally), to push for more intensive background checks before people are permitted to acquire firearms—all these seem like reasonable steps forward, none of which would infringe on any non-criminal, mentally-stable citizen’s right to bear arms. But there’s also an attitudinal change we need to work towards and, at that, not one specifically related to the NRA or to the Second Amendment but rather to the way we think of the victims of these shootings.

They appear briefly on the front page of the nation’s newspapers for a day or two. If there is something particularly gruesome about the incident that took their lives, then their hold on our national imagination is stronger—and, indeed, the victims at Columbine, Orlando, Parkland, Pittsburgh, and Charleston actually have become part of our national narrative. But what of the rest?

I took note the other day of the two-hundredth birthday of the most original of all American poets and Long Island’s greatest son, Walt Whitman. I’ve been a fan for a long time—the boy in my story “Under the Wheel” who walks around high school with a copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in his knapsack was my adolescent self—and my admiration for the man has only grown over the years. I mention the anniversary of his birth on May 31, 1819, in Huntington, New York, however, not merely to take note of his bicentenary, but because he, of all people, suggests to me how to respond to the endless spate of gun murders in our nation.

If there was one thing Whitman stood for, and in every conceivable way, it was the sacrosanct autonomy of the individual.  Over and over in Leaves of Grass the poet returns to that specific idea, but also to the one he presents as its corollary: the paradoxical notion that the justification for democracy itself rests in the core concept that the individual possesses an inviolate right to live free of the constraints of others and the restraints of society…and that the perfect nation (in his unabashed conception, our own) is one in which citizens band together to promote a society that promotes the inalienable autonomy of the individual.

In other words, the core concept that permeates all of Whitman’s work is that, unlike in the world of insects where the swarm is the thing and the individual bugs that make it up are basically indistinguishable from each other even in their own eyes, in the world of human beings the individual is not merely the building block of society but an entire universe unto him or herself, one that has no more need of the permission of others to rotate on its own axis and at its own speed than the Milky Way needs the permission of other galaxies to travel endlessly through the cosmos on its own and in its own way.

My proposal is that we honor Whitman’s memory by rededicating ourselves to the notion that each man, woman, or child killed in an act of senseless gun violence is best to be taken not a mere individual, but as the nation itself, and that the incident that took that person’s life is thus correctly to be understood as an act of aggression not against that one man or woman but against the American people itself. That core concept—that the individual is the nation and the nation is each of its citizens—is Whitman’s personal gift to the question of how to respond to gun violence in America.

A young man of eighteen, Kendrick Ray Castillo, gave his life on May 7 in the STEM School Highlands Ranch shooting in Douglas County, Colorado, while trying to disarm one of the two shooters who had entered the school building. (Two others joined him in the effort, both of who survived.) Kendrick was lionized in the national press briefly, particularly since the Highlands Ranch shooting occurred just a week after the shooting at the University of North Carolina Charlotte campus in which a different young man, Riley Howell, also lost his life while selflessly and bravely trying to tackle the gunman and thus to give his classmates time to escape. Both men were heroes and deserve to be remembered as such, but as the days pass and the stories of these two particularly school shootings—just two among eight shootings in American schools this year so far and surely not the last—join non-school incidents (148 this year so far and counting) in becoming impossible for any of us to keep straight in our heads, we need to resolve to consider each loss separately and to feel personally aggressed against whenever an innocent life is taken by some angry person with a gun. E pluribus unum does not mean that when we come together as a people we abandon our identities as individuals, but just the opposite: that, as Whitman wrote over and over, the republic exists as a monument to the supreme value of the individual and so, from membership among the many comes the strength of the one to endure….and to flourish unimpeded by the violent machinations of others. The attacks that took the lives of 6,027 Americans (not a typo: click here) in acts of gun-related violence so far this year alone are attacks against the republic itself because each American individual is the nation. That was Whitman’s greatest lesson and it the one I suggest we all take to heart as we attempt not to file Virginia Beach away as just one more tragedy to take stock of and then to move on from.