The essays, analyses and opinions presented as Community Voices express the perspectives of their authors on topics of interest and importance to the community, and are not intended to reflect perspectives on behalf of the Salish Current.
Commentary: “Violence is a part of American culture. … It is as American as cherry pie.”
I was a freshman at Sumner High School when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. At home two days later, we watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald live on our black-and-white TV. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were all killed before the end of my first year of college.
When King, my hero, was killed, I remember thinking this had to change everything. Life simply couldn’t resume without a ripple. The only thing I could think of in the moment was to quit my housekeeping job for a professor and his wife. I was surprised they didn’t understand my imperative to stop ironing their clothes and vacuuming their floors. (It occurred to me afterward that Dr. Salgo, a Jew who had made it to the U.S. from Hungary in 1937, might use a different scale for the personal impact of historic events.)
Two months later Robert F. Kennedy was shot and I thought that no new national disaster could ever have the power to surprise me.
A whole lot has changed in the decades since that spring of 1968. Although more than 40 years have passed since a shooter has targeted and wounded a presidential candidate, the number of mass killings in the United States has risen sharply. We have altered the definition of “unthinkable” in ways that demean us all. It’s no longer impossible to imagine being gunned down at random at a synagogue, at a mosque, at a school, at a concert, at a parade, at the grocery store.
Another change is that our personal responses, our hot takes of shock or sadness, or blame, or resolve, are now available to an audience of millions. When I struggled to respond as a teenager to national trauma, only my bemused employers and a few friends heard about it. Now I can share my thoughts and my manifestos with the world, and so can my children and grandchildren.
I’m online a lot and I’m seeing the familiar themes: “This is who we are.” “This isn’t who we are.” “The Democrats are to blame.” “The Republicans are to blame.” “The media are to blame.”
The calls to unity are also familiar: “We are not enemies, we are neighbors,” Biden said. “In this moment, it is more important than ever that we stand United, and show our True Character as Americans, remaining Strong and Determined, and not allowing Evil to Win,” Trump wrote.
We’ve learned over these decades that the motives of the actual shooters may be peripheral — their power comes from access to weaponry rather than from force of ideas. John Hinckley Jr. wanted to impress Jodie Foster. Sirhan Sirhan, who is still in prison, hated RFK for supporting Israel in the Six-Day War, but he acted as an individual and he told interviewers later he wouldn’t have done it had he not been drunk.
An attack on a national figure happens to a nation. But I’ve come to think that the responses that matter most in the end are the ones we make as individuals. We are formed by our own past and, whether we want to admit it or not, by the history that brought us here. And that history is violent.
These United States united themselves through a violent revolution; we challenged and reaffirmed it through a violent civil war. We enlarged our territory through energy and vision, and also through violent invasion and suppression. Those are facts.
“Violence is a part of America’s culture,” said the Black Power activist H. Rap Brown in 1967. “It is as American as cherry pie.” I remember that quote. I was just heading off to college, idealistic and hopeful, and I didn’t want to believe it. It took me a long time to accept the facts, and the truth of the cliché that the only way out is through. We can’t build unity on a fantasy foundation. As people and as a country, we can’t live freely while fearing the skeletons in our closets.
My father was a journalist and had a daily radio news program in the 1950s and ’60s.
He was also a preacher’s kid and a WWII vet. In his letters home from the Aleutians, he often talked about his hutmates. Some thought we were fighting the wrong enemy, that Hitler had it right. Some were mad about sharing the base (though not their living quarters) with Black servicemen. Many weren’t much interested in the war as a world-shaping project; they just wanted to get home, or at least get promoted. They were not under fire, it didn’t feel like a band of brothers, and my dad missed that sense of common purpose.
Back home on the radio, he mostly reported on events around his hometown of Tacoma. But then as now, people with platforms feel called to use them. When JFK died he broadcast a commentary that was widely heard and reprinted at the time. It came from his own history. And inevitably it has formed part of mine, which I pass on as best I can.
“The lasting lesson is that we Americans are not a breed apart. We are buffeted by the passions that tear at all mankind. For Americans, as for all men, civilization remains something not to be preserved but to be achieved.”
— By Lane Morgan
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