There is a quote in a recent feature in the Washington Post that I have not been able to get out of my head for a few days. The story is a bout a group of mothers from the Covenant School who have been doing the hard work of trying to get Tennessee state legislators to hear their stories in hopes of some sort of reform to the Volunteer State’s gun laws. There is presently a special session of the Tennessee Legislature that was called in the wake of the March school shooting in which three children and three adults committed to serving children were killed.
You should read the entire article just to get a sense of the grinding boots-on-the-ground efforts that many people have taken up in the midst of tragedy. But the quote that I cannot get out of my mind comes from a state senator by the name of Todd Gardenhire.
In a pair of quoted interviews, Gardenhire declared, “Where were these young, rich white mothers when the Black kids in my district and Memphis were getting slaughtered?…It doesn’t mean their issues aren’t valid, but it’s a little hypocritical.” and “They’ve never been involved until it hits them, and now they want to change the world. I’m not minimizing the pain and agony that they felt. But where have they been in the past?”
First, intentionally or not, the man is absolutely minimizing their pain and agony. Secondly, you would think that someone actually concerned about the Black kids in his district getting murdered would be more sympathetic to…well, anyone. But instead he is using the victims of tragedy as a prop to discredit other victims of a tragedy. I do not know Gardenhire’s heart, but his comments read as extremely callous and cynical and insulting to mothers of both Black kids and white kids. We should absolutely care what happens to kids in all neighborhoods everywhere, but that does not seem to be the point he is actually trying to make.
Listen, like Gardenhire, I am a white, college-educated male and I will just say on behalf of this over-represented-in-government demographic that you would like to remove all of us from legislatures for one term, you have my blessing. It would probably do some good; kind of like turning off your computer and turning it back on.
Sorry, I got way off track there. The real reason those quotes have haunted me is that I think that a lot of us kind of agree with him. We don’t want to be seen as bandwagon activists who join up with a cause just because it hits close to home or because it is popular. It is as if there is this pure, selfless state of activism and those are the only people that should be leading the charge.
But that’s not true. Most people in politics are in the game to get involved with what “hits them.” Or to reframe it in a more moral, theological way, everything that happens effects all of us. The fates of the children at Covenant and in Gardenhire’s district and children on the other side of the world are tied up in the fate of you, me, and our children.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (seriously, you should just go read “Birmingham Jail” right now): “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
All of it hits all of us. Gun laws, poverty, racism, education, and everything else. It is not hypocritical to care about something that hits close to home, because if you have any sort of a pulse then you realize that everything that happens is a heartbeat away from home. We are bound together. From the Judeo-Christian tradition that I follow (the same one that is purportedly super represented in legislatures all of over this country), we are taught to love our neighbors as ourselves. And we come to find out that our neighbor is everybody.
So by all means, please change the world and do not let anyone in power scoff at you because you are trying. Don’t let them try to paint you as wannabe heroes looking for glory. Because changing the world is not a selfless thing; we all have skin in the game. Yet desiring to change this world for the better is the right thing to do and we are all stewards of our little corner of this place.
Let us come together and work for the common good in our legislative bodies, in our communities, in our every day lives. It is okay to jump on the bandwagon even if you feel like you should have done so a long time ago. It’s never too late.