Photo by Maria Lysenko on Unsplash
My mouth literally hangs open as I read the e-mail, silence around me in the office, the first rays of sun peeking through the window, the scent of coffee forcing open my eyelids, preparing for a successful workday as a cog in the Capitalist machine.
The e-mail was there as soon as I opened my inbox, and as my eyes scan down the text, I feel a sense of surreality, as if I am a character in a Netflix series, learning about the fictional quest or crisis or dystopian society that will ultimately reveal my tenacity and the true nature of the harsh, harsh world.
“Given our efforts to secure…,” it begins, “… will be a real-time, active-threat exercise to prepare…”
I continue reading.
“…in association with local authorities…individual with a firearm entering…shooting a semi-automatic weapon.”
My face is furrowed into a mask of confusion, and revulsion, and pure befuddlement, but it’s the next sentence that shakes off all of those pesky emotions cobwebbing the rage at my core and focuses this hate into a single point, a laser beam, the nexus of all that is wrong and something which is, apparently, about to go down at my office.
“… ‘firearm’ will be a training…simulates the experience…smell of the weapon...everyone to participate.”
I’m sorry, what? asks my inner monologue. Is this satire? asks my inner monologue. How do I feel about this? asks my inner monologue.
And the part of me, the core, infused with vitriol, the socially-conscious part that loathes firearms, the public-health part that recognizes the pandemic of gun violence, the CPTSD-part that hates loud noises, the empathy part that still sees the anguish on the faces of the parents of Sandy Hook, answers back:
Oh, hell, no.
###
I work in an 8-story building in a well-populated urban center. While there is nothing remarkable about the building itself – other than a poorly-thought-out design essentially requiring a tesseract to get anywhere between floors – the nature of my work is such that my office building does represent a slightly higher threat level, in the domestic terrorism sense. It isn’t super-secret government work, and I’m not an assassin, but even humanitarian services to assist those in need can be divisive in 2020.
It is because of this divisiveness that my building is an ideal location for a training exercise, apparently, for first responders for whom a mass shooting is an unfortunately, unfortunately, unfortunately, increasingly likely scenario.
My dialectical side, trained by Hegel and Linehan, sees the importance in this even as my inner monologue struggles to convey the degree of its aversion to the upcoming event. After all, if prophylactic medicine is a good thing, shouldn’t also prophylactic security be the same? A first responder cannot be expected to react the same way in the field as they would in training; blood and screams and shots, the stuff of sense memories, the stuff of nightmares, and the chaos of reality in that moment of reality would surely elicit a different response than the sanctity of a classroom, walls painted a dull gray and fire extinguishers on the walls and always an answer to what “should” be done at any given time. Because, in actual reality, there isn’t always an answer to “should” at any given time.
But then, the side of me that has been damaged, the side of me that feels too much, the side of me that battles mental illness and trauma, makes its presence felt, and I can no longer appreciate the value of training our paramedics and police officers to respond to an active shooter, because doesn’t anyone see that this is treating the symptom and not the cause?
###
Play the mental health card, my inner monologue urges.
I seek out my supervisor. She is not yet in the office, so I rush back to the computer, begin composing an e-mail, feeling what I can only describe as mania as I try to organize my thoughts.
“I have grave concerns…,” I start out. Then I delete what I have written, forward the original e-mail to her instead, and begin again.
“Regarding the e-mail below, I have grave concerns about how I might react to such a charged and emotional situation.”
I go on, attempting to convey my disgust for, and fear of, firearms, my CPTSD diagnosis, my anxiety disorder, flashbacks and panic attacks and an overwhelming sense of things being wrong, stuck in between fight and flight and freeze and fold.
“I abhor guns,” I continue. “It is difficult to convey the degree of my distaste in general, but I have a visceral dislike of even being in the vicinity of firearms.”
I realize I am beginning to sound desperate, or unhinged, or FAR too invested in gun violence advocacy, but I can’t stop. I pour into the e-mail all of my frustrations, with a government that refuses to acknowledge the problem, with a society that fetishizes weapons of power and death, with the line we crossed when we decreed dead children were still not as important as our right to bear arms.
People begin to trickle into the office, and I press “send.”
My officemate arrives, and I urge him to check his e-mail.
“Oh, wow,” he says.
“I KNOW!” I say, prepared to launch into my diatribe, because even now, after the cathartic typing of my stance and its evidence, I am still feeling manic with apprehension, with injustice, with purpose.
I am interrupted by the phone, and an assistant, and the phone again, and an urgent request for a report, and the day churns on, my agitation with the second amendment simmering on a back burner.
I mean, is this really what the forefathers intended when they wrote the Bill of Rights?” my inner monologue asks. Do you really think they were referring to semiautomatics when they promised an infant country its guns, and only then to resist tyranny? it questions. What if we interpreted firearms to mean exactly what it did in the 18th century? it wonders. I bet mass shooters would think twice if they had to load gunpowder and lead balls into a musket, it comments.
Before I know it, the brunt of the morning has passed, and I am momentarily startled when I see the e-mailed response, as if it wasn’t just proposed we endure mock terror, mock mortal fear, mock trauma, as if I didn’t vehemently disagree with the entire notion, as if it’s possible to forget in America in 2020 that this is bubbling just below the surface of everything.
“I’ve spoken to HR,” it begins. “It is fine to miss the…thank you for…leave around 3:30 for the day.”
I exhale. When you have a history of mental illness, trying to explain your emotions and reactions can feel Sisyphean-ly futile, and it is always a relief to be, to feel, understood.
###
Another morning, another sunrise, another day of my inbox dictating my worth through the lens of Capitalism.
It is the morning after the active shooter drill, an event I have gratefully and successfully avoided and hope never to have to experience, and I am waiting eagerly for my officemate. Looking around, it’s like you would never know there had been semiautomatic rifles fired, employees sheltering in place, paramedics rushing around to save “victims” (read: employees, volunteer tributes to sacrifice theoretical lives on the altar of education), shouting and gunshots and paintballs.
I did not see, just then, the bullet casings by the water cooler I would later pocket, strangely compelled, and then place on my desk by my laptop and ficas. I did not see the neon orange paint still splashed on the doorframe, just a remnant, an impression, a reminder of the fake violence that transpired, like the scar that is left on the psyches of all who live through such an event. I did not see the woman across the hall arrive looking pale and drawn, and could not have known that she spent the entire exercise crying in a closet. Not then. Then, it looked like nothing had happened, and I suppose that makes sense, because isn’t that exactly how it is two weeks after any mass shooting these days?
My coworker arrives, and I pounce on the opportunity.
“What was it like?” I ask. “Was it intense?” I ask. “Did they have the added bad taste to make the ‘active shooter’ a Person of Color”? I ask. The same compulsion which led me to pick up the bullet shells wants details, wants to gawk at a car wreck, wants want Joseph Conrad calls the “fascination with the abomination”, wants to revel in my disgust and near holy hatred like a masochist.
He describes for me the experience, the deep voice of the alleged shooter, yelling threats, playing a role, the hour of extended gunfire, countless shots in the span of a painfully finite time and the hundreds upon hundreds of casings left on the floor at its conclusion, a literal field to wade through comprised of the aftereffects of carnage, trash thoughtlessly discarded after an event signifying the worst of which the human species is capable.
I look at my two casings, feeling almost dirty, feeling repelled, feeling almost turned on by the power they possess, even in death, and feeling my loathing of all they represent right next to that arousal. A dialectic, and maybe that’s what’s at the foundation of this fanaticism, this addiction, this worshipping of a symbol and an inalienable right and an outdated ethos, lifting the Second Amendment to the status of a Golden idol which we are then too wary of to recognize aloud – this love of, and need for, power, in a situation in which so much feels so powerless.
There are more e-mails, a thank you to all who participated, a memo listing all that the drill accomplished, all the good that was done by lying down for death, a calendar invite for an all-staff debrief.
Debrief is the right word, says my inner monologue.
###
I am excused from the debrief as well, and life has since returned to normal. Any other stray casings were found and discarded; the leftover paint was scrubbed from the wall; emotional selves healed. Capitalism resumes, the machine trudges, and we all do our part to work, to help, to love and be loved as all human beings intrinsically need.
But I am left, as always, with an impotent anger.
This is my personal experience with gun violence. While I have not lost a nuclear family member to this pandemic, I have lost other things. I have lost all the potential of all the children who were ever killed by a gun, lost all the good they could have added to the world if they were only lucky enough to grow up, the cures for cancer and the sustainable solutions and all the brilliant art they could have created. I have lost acquaintances, to death by suicide or murder by firearm, and have seen their devastated family members and friends try to process that grief. I have lost my faith, in my elected officials, in the goodness of the human condition, in a Judeo-christian deity who allows this madness to continue unfettered. I feel like I have lost my hope for the future.
Gun violence is a scourge, a public health crisis, an Achilles Heel for a nation that is now the brunt of an international joke. And while we can train our EMTs and cops to respond, to practice how they would react if the unthinkable and yet inevitable is to happen, to desensitize themselves to the horror of it all, we cannot address that which is at the route of gun violence: Implicit racial bias. Socioeconomic inequity. Corrupt interests that bar the democratic process. History, and prejudice, and, under it all, that Nietzschean desire for power, power over, that a gun so well represents.
Firearms are chaotic evil, and the culture which surrounds them is implicit in their damage. It is the light, the good, the possibility of other possibilities to which I now cling, the dream that the artists, the writers, the social justice warriors, the grieving-parents-turned activists, that everyone fighting for the side of what’s right can actually make a difference.
However slim this possibility might be, it has always been the zeitgeist which forces change, a canary in a coal mine, a predecessor and a precognition of what is to come. And as we write, advocate, rally, make art, it is this desire for a better society for the future that sustains us. And it is from that well that true change, change which addresses root cause as well as a symptomatic society, will finally come.
Hope, comments my inner monologue. There is still hope.
Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children, soulmate, and cats. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, a Contributing Editor for Barren Magazine, and a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy. Shannon served as writer-in-residence for the Sundress Academy for the Arts and was selected as a NASA social media intern for an official launch from Cape Canaveral. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Drunk Monkeys, Spelk Fiction, Scary Mommy, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter @mrsgreenstein or her website: shannonfrostgreenstein.com. She comes up when you Google her.
