America is afraid. It is a scared country filled with scared people, all desperately wishing they weren’t so scared all the time. It is a place that was built on fear, thrives on fear, at times excels because of fear. This is a fact it would rather ignore.
Americans are taught that there is nobody coming to save them, that at all times they are on their own. The property that forms the backbone of their concept of liberty could be stripped from them at any minute. It is through this lens that property becomes equivalent with life, the protecting of one at times being seen as protecting the other.
America is an armed country. It is a country drowning in bullet casings, where guns outnumber people. There are fewer and fewer safeguards in place controlling who can own a gun, where they can carry a gun, who has the right to tell them to put their gun down.
A gun can feel like a necessity in a place like America. A gun can make a person feel invincible in a place like America.
Scared and invincible is a terrible combination. Together they form a reality in which a knock on the wrong door, approaching the wrong car, turning into the wrong driveway, can be a fatal mistake. Together they form a cycle that has left broken bodies and families strewn across the landscape as far as the eye can see.
Scared and invincible is a terrible combination.
Andrew Lester, 84, was a paranoid man, according to his grandson. Lester opened fire twice on Ralph Yarl, 16, when the Black teen mistakenly rang his doorbell last Thursday as he attempted to pick up his younger siblings from a neighbor. Klint Lundwig later told the Kansas City Star that his grandfather in the past few years had become caught up in “a 24-hour news cycle of fear and paranoia” that “further radicalized him in a lot of ways.” Black bodies are always to be feared in a place like America, no matter their age.
It is not a coincidence that gun sales have spiked in recent years based on fear that has often been packaged…
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