Susan and I met up with our physician friend and colleague Enrique this afternoon for a drink and a chat at the Central Market bistro. I had a glass of Chardonnay, Susan had a Porter, and Enrique brought a flask of chocolate milk. Enrique will outlive us and deservedly so.
Years ago, we used to get together more weeks than not, but then the COVID Apocalypse changed all that. We are all vaccinated and boosted; still, at his workplace two physicians and four staffers have come down with the virus. Everyone among his workmates is vaccinated; so, the infections have not been severe. Knock on wood.
It was good to get together again. We are informal social supports for one another. Enrique is not yet retired, but his retirement is in sight. When we get together, we talk about our kids, our siblings, the stock market, the economy, the Jan 6th coup attempt, and other current events. No surprise that the mass shootings in Buffalo, Uvalde, and Tulsa came up in our conversation this afternoon.
Enrique allowed as how he had heard an interview with a female trauma surgeon who held the opinion that images of the injured bodies of mass shooting victims should appear in the press – an homage to Emit Till’s open casket viewing, as it were. We discussed the idea in the context of others who had proposed something similar these past few weeks. I myself have become so jaded and cynical about Americans’ intransigence regarding firearm safety that I said that those who most needed to see the maimed bodies of the victims would simply avert their gaze. If you don’t look at it, it doesn’t exist.
We chatted a bit more, and Enrique commented that when he was a child in a Jewish school in Mexico City, he and his classmates had to view pictures of the Holocaust. Maybe you saw such pictures in High School – children’s shoes piled in mounds; boxes of wedding bands and dental fillings, perhaps human bodies covered in lime in mass graves. I remember such images, but I was not a young child when I first saw them. As we reminisced about the impact of these images from our youths, I recalled the Holocaust Museums, and their value as teaching tools. Tools that insist that our collective memory cannot be allowed to forget or deny these events. The museums are a way of saying Never Again.
I suddenly felt the need to say that we needed a Mass Shooting Victims’ Museum. Such a museum would commemorate the lives lost at UT Austin, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Georgia Tech, and so many more thereafter culminating in Buffalo, Uvalde, and now Tulsa. Such a museum would not identify the murderers except to mention whether they murdered their own families before rampaging on innocent strangers with whom they had no legitimate quarrel. Each display might mention the weapon(s) of destruction and their makers, and the date and place of each massacre. Most of the displays would be devoted to the recognition of the lives of the fallen – as someone’s children, parents, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters – their lives, their contributions, their aspirations, and yes, images of their bodies mutilated by gun violence.
Would such memorials make a difference? The ember of optimism that still exists in my consciousness says perhaps. But the hardened heart that gets me from this day to the next says: They will avert their gaze.