When Is Enough, Enough?
We live in an age where there is one big central question that hangs over many things, occasionally haunting us, sometimes mocking us, always challenging us and that question is, when is enough, enough? That question is out there for each one of us to answer framed by any number of national issues. As questions go, it’s not very spiritual, though it is personal and it reveals a lot about us, both individually and collectively.
As for the question itself, at least when it comes to gun violence in this country, not quite 10 years ago I thought we had the makings of an answer. Coming off the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting where a deranged soul shot and killed 26 people, twenty of whom were first graders between the ages of six and seven, I thought that that would be the moment when we would have had enough. But I was wrong.
When it comes to mass shootings and gun violence and having the political will and perhaps a little guts to enact common sense gun laws like background checks and red flag laws, I had to remind myself last week that if having 20 first graders massacred wasn’t enough to move the needle back in 2012, then the recent massacre in which 19 fourth graders in Uvalde, Texas lost their lives wasn’t going to get us to “enough”.
While completely disheartened to realize that the massacre of innocent school children wasn’t and isn’t sufficient to get us to our “enough is enough” moment, I then set my sights on size and quantity, telling myself that if the body count were high enough in a single act of madness, then surely such an incident would be sufficient to get us to a moment where we said “enough is enough”. But I was wrong again.
I found out how wrong I was in 2017 when another damaged and deranged soul decided to perch himself thirty-two floors up in a Las Vegas hotel window opening fire on 20,000 people attending a music festival below in a nearby parking lot. When the shooting stopped, there were 60 dead and upwards of 800 wounded. As high as that body count was, it didn’t get us to our “enough is enough” moment.
So maybe the only thing left to stir us to action on gun reforms will be the sheer volume of mass shootings and perhaps the frequency of such incidents. For example, no sooner did we digest the news of a mass shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, then the news breaks about the mass shooting in Uvaldi, Texas and while we were absorbing the news out of Uvalde, we were confronted with the news of mass shooting at a medical clinic in Tulsa. By the time you read this, there may be another city in the headlines.
This challenge in getting us to our “enough is enough” moments is by no means confined to gun violence. Consider our inability or unwillingness to enact and enforce meaningful measures to address climate change and global warming which has its own body count. One example is the heat wave that hit Washington State and British Columbia last year that resulted in 1,037 dead Americans and Canadians when temps got up to 110F and 121F respectively.
Deaths from heat waves caused by climate change are not as sensational as mass shootings, but they’re impactful just the same and when you stack up the frequency and severity of hurricanes and tornadoes, catastrophic floods, and year-round wildfires, you might think we could arrive at our “enough is enough” moment, but that doesn’t seem to be the case whether for the climate crisis or much of anything else these days.
We’re facing many unbelievable things in this country. According to the Department Health and Human Services, more than 760,000 people have died from drug overdoses since 1999. The CDC puts that number at roughly 841,000. Whatever the source and whatever the number, when is enough, enough?
I can’t help but think that somewhere along the way, while embracing the politics of anger and grievance, we’ve sacrificed our capacity to be genuinely shocked and humbled by events. More than that, reaching our “enough is enough” threshold as Americans has become that much harder for us and I fear we’re paying an unbelievably heavy price in the form of pain, suffering, and fear.