Freedom From Fear in the 21st Century

[Readers, I have delayed my intended coverage of the Plymouth Town Election results in light of the massacre in Texas. I do not normally cover national issues, but some issues affect the entire nation, including Plymouth County and Southeastern Massachusetts.]

In this terrible hour for the United States, I think it is important to remember that eight decades ago our forbears fought a war, in the ruins of ancient cities, on burning tropical isles, in factories and shipyards, against some of the worst forces in human history.

They won that war, and one of the Four Freedoms they fought for was what FDR called Freedom from Fear — the right of everyone to live our lives without the nagging terror of gunshots and battle-wounds.

It is painfully obvious today that we do not have Freedom from Fear in this country. We have instead a plague of episodic massacre, such that children – babies, really, most of them – and their parents cannot be confident they will return from school safely. Such that dear grandparents cannot buy groceries without fear of a racist mass murderer.

This cannot go on. We are supposed to be a democracy, and we can unite to stop these horrors, just as we defeated the Axis Powers in WWII.

My entire adult life — Columbine was nearly a quarter century ago — has been punctuated by these massacres. In those same decades, we have seen a rise of social atomization, political hyper-partisanship, and a degradation of our common life and of community values.

Very plainly, our current system is not working. We are a very divided society. I see it in this “Red” corner of a “Blue” state.

But politics is not the Red Sox vs. the Yankees. It is our common life and destiny. I’d suggest we follow New England Town Meeting rules and “speak to the issue,” and the issue alone. The great and vast majority of us agree on the essential truth that children, grandparents, teachers, all of us, have a right to be free from fear of murder in our daily lives.

To that end, I think we can all in this democracy of ours begin a discussion that focuses on three major aspects of the questions: The first issue is Guns. We have more guns per capita than Yemen. This is not supportable, in my view.

The second is Mental Health. We are in a full blown mental health crisis in this country. Recent studies indicate about 1 in 4 young Americans experience suicidal thoughts on a regular basis. Obviously the overwhelming majority of people dealing with mental illness are not violent.

But support for the wounded, whether physically or mentally, is a moral duty for any society; here, too, our current status quo is not working.

Third, the Nation is suffering a severe spiritual crisis around what Robert F. Kennedy — just a few weeks before himself being felled by an assassin’s bullet — called “the mindless menace of violence.”

It is extremely disturbing to see these young men, with their whole lives ahead of them, so consumed with hatred of others that they murder grandmothers because of the color of their skin, or children who still have their baby teeth. It is contrary to the canons of our great religions, and the values of human civilization. What are the roots of this crisis? How do we solve it? And not in some distant millennium, but today, now.

I am convinced that 99% of us want children to go to school, and grandparents to go grocery shopping, without being murdered. We may not always agree on the means, but the vast majority of us agree on the ends — Freedom from Fear in the 21st Century.

Let’s preserve it as our ancestors did, and defend once more the common life of the many against the murderous hatred of the few, “and make gentle the life of the world.”

Contact your elected officials here: https://www.usa.gov/elected-officials.