Guest column: The flag at half-mast has become an unexceptional sight
I was 10 years old the first time I saw the American flag fly at half-mast. It was November 22, 1963, and as I and my fellow classmates witnessed that unusual site out of our fourth-grade window, we asked our teacher what that meant. That was how we all found out that our president had been killed. Unbeknown to us at the time, it was start of our exodus from innocence.
Children today have no such seminal event because too many of them are growing up with the ugly sounds of sirens sprinkled with gunshots interrupting their nursery rhymes and play days in the park. More and more they are seeing their lives being drawn on a distorted canvas as the news of mass shootings becomes far to commonplace. To them, the flag at half-mast is an unexceptional sight as the flag is lowered each time another irrational act of violence stains our country and shames us all and we are left to wonder who next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed.
It would be easy to say that the flag is at half-mast far too often for a civilized society, but that presumes that we are in fact civilized. With each mass shooting and each debate about gun laws and concealed weapons and semi-automatic rifles and background checks and ghost guns and buyback programs resulting in little more than an impotent national response to such violence, my reasons to doubt our civility become that much greater.
Guns have always been part of the story of America and Americans have always exercised their right to bear arms. Cowboys in white hats were always faster on the draw than the bad men who came to Dodge and we all cheered "Dirty Harry" cleaning up the streets of San Francisco. But there is something darker and more disturbing and more poisonous at play today as we once again debate the Second Amendment and reawaken the eternal battle of individual liberty vs. common good.
Today we have more guns than people in the United States and gun violence is now the leading cause of death for our children. But the inconvenient truth is that in many circles the answer to these alarming numbers is little more than counseling our children on how to cope with seeing their classmates die or teaching them how to prepare for the next tragedy that is sure to happen.
We baby boomers have been down this road before when we were taught to “duck and cover” in case of nuclear attack. That absurdity continued until someone figured out there needs to be a better way. The answer was found not in learning how to live through such an attack, but how to avoid it in the first place. So, too, there is a war taking place in America today that we again need to learn how to avoid. But unlike the cold war, today’s battle is not with a foreign nation. America is at war with itself and that war is getting hotter by the day.
The carnage on our streets has become so overwhelming that I fear we will become numb to it all. We must never let that happen. We must never accept this new reality. We must never become paralyzed into inaction. We must demand better of ourselves if we are to rekindle the American dream. We must find a way to extinguish the tinder that lit the spark for the darkened violent mood in the country. And we must rededicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
Ross K. Goldberg is a Westlake Village resident and author of the books “Food on the Table” and “I Only Know What I Know.”
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Guest column: The flag at half-mast has become an unexceptional sight
