Don’t. Ever. Forget.

The importance of sustaining memory for action

Many of the mailboxes on my street are now adorned with red-and-black ribbons of remembrance, in the school colors of The Covenant School. These personal, private memorials call on any who pass to keep the lost families of that school alive in our hearts.

These now bloom insistently across Green Hills, Forest Hills, Oak Hill and adjacent neighborhoods of our injured and grieving city.

One beribboned mailbox in Green Hills, commemorating the deaths at Covenant School. Photo by Keel Hunt

The mailbox displays are small but have their own quiet grassroots power. These street-level reminders - and any reminder - are necessary now. Each one adds urgency to keep hope alive for a legislative solution to senseless, persistence gun violence.

Here’s why… The outrage is here now. But the next available round of legislative elections, unfortunately, is far away.

Gov. Bill Lee, who has become justly famous for doing the bidding of the gun industry, made much ado last week about consenting to a limited-effect executive order to permit removal of deadly weapons from persons who might injure themselves or others. His words sounded encouraging but reality quickly set in, first in the form of skepticism and opposition from state legislators who oppose even that limited fix.

Is there hope of a more effective statute? Maybe, but the odds are against us on this Sunday.

We are already seeing an ugly old status quo in state government. It’s a traditional resistance to safer and more sensible and humane gun laws, an implacable gun industry, its lobbyists, and their political campaign money. Together with grieving families, neighbors and friends of Covenant School and its six lost victims, we are looking to the state Capitol now - for hope and some sign of rescue. But the defenders of the status quo are implacable, adamant, defiant, and dismissive.

There is a particular worry now that the General Assembly may be rushing to an adjournment this week for the rest of the year. Republican members in the extremist supermajority, in any case, have not distinguished themselves in the slightest so far, but instead have brought embarrassment and ridicule onto themselves and Tennessee.

The politicians in authority at the state Capitol now are counting on us - you and me - to simply forget the atrocity of the March 27, on that murderous Monday morning, and all the comparable horrors that have involved guns so freely available in Tennessee.

Yet we must not forget.

Too much work remains to be done. Too many preparations for the next election need doing. A central part of this prep, in my view, requires sustaining the strong emotions that we feel now - the essential memory of what was taken from our community on that awful Monday morning.

Immediate action is needed in order to secure even the slightest corrective legislative actios that Gov. Lee himself has now hopefully advocated. On Friday that so-called “red flag law” had not even been drafted by the governor’s office. When will even this happen?

Legislative leaders, famously in thrall to the gun industry and its political contributions to their re-elections, are already sounding the standard lines about personal freedom, due process, protecting the liberties of gun-owners, the importance of due process for owners of automatic weapons.

By now, the so-called leaders at our state Capitol, those who prefer to keep the status quo undisrupted at all the human costs, have a standard set of defensive, protectionist talking points. (A common one: “With so much emotion in the air,” they will say, “now is not the time to be making new policies and rules about gun purchases.”) That’s a foolish belief, but it’s a standard line, and people (both children and adults) clearly are dying in America because of the intransigence of people who use that and other dodges.

Many of these lawmakers who will not act, for now, behave like this because they feel secure in their safe seats, shielded from any real partisan competition by their comfortable gerrymandered districts. Meanwhile, they are so smooth, tailored, and scripted in their smug, glib resistance to gun law reform - if they speak out at all. Yet, they never speak of the civil liberties and freedoms of the smallest victims of gun violence, whose injuries from semi-automatic weapon fire are considered medically “unsurvivable.”

These helpless victims, along with their grieving parents and teachers, are who we all must remember: The ache of loss in our hearts, knowing they are gone forever. These must be the essential and persistent memories - together with how they died - that we the living must be strong and resolute about now, and do so literally for months yet to come. This will not be easy but hard, yet it must urgently be done.

And, in my opinion, it must also happen within a highly organized framework deployed by capable leaders. Other organizing categories are candidate recruitment, candidate training, campaign finance, and all the rest. Somehow courage and persistence must also be stirred into the mix of their practical preparedness - inasmuch as partisan gerrymandering has exacted a stern toll on the chances for actual competition in our legislative races. This is a tall order.

Competition has always been the key to good government in Tennessee, as well as the election of level-headed pragmatists at key moments of our history. Even the strongest legislative challengers cannot alone overcome the power of a skewed race in a redrawn district that was recently designed for keeping the Republican official in that office.

So all of that, plus the skills and organization of the Tennessee Democratic Party and its donors, will be tested now and over the next 18 month leading up to the general elections of 2024.

Meanwhile, we must all remember with keen clarity the stakes involved in permitting this monstrous set of circumstances to control our lives and the reputation of our city and state any further.

Do not forget any of this.

Don’t ever forget.

© 2023 Keel Hunt